The metal teeth of a heavy excavator do not care about family photographs. They do not pause over a hand-woven rug or the corner of a room where a child used to sleep. When the state brings machinery to a coastal village like Jiwani, in Pakistan’s Gwadar district, the sound precedes the dust. It is a mechanical roar that signals a profound shift in the rules of survival.
On a recent morning, the earth shook under the treads of bulldozers. Security forces, primarily from the Frontier Corps, stood guard while the steel claws went to work. One by one, homes crumbled. Seven residential structures were reduced to jagged mounds of concrete and splintered wood.
To the bureaucrats who sign the orders, these are likely just grid coordinates on a map of Balochistan. To the families standing in the punishing heat, watching the walls of their lives collapse without a shred of legal process or prior judicial approval, it is something else entirely.
It is the mathematics of grief.
The Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC) calls this an escalation of collective punishment. To understand what that phrase means in human terms, one must look at the specific doorsteps targeted by the state.
Consider a family that has already been hollowed out. Asghar Ali disappeared into the dark vortex of forced disappearances some time ago. For his relatives, life became a grueling cycle of security raids, relentless intimidation, and state pressure to sign coerced statements. They were already living in a state of suspended mourning.
Then came the heavy machinery.
The state did not just take their son; it took the roof that sheltered his memory. The residences of six other local men—Rizwan Rasheed, Ali Asghar, Ghulam Nabi Jaffar, Yar Jan, Mohammad Jan, and Ghani Jaffar—suffered the exact same fate. Their properties were obliterated under extreme weather conditions, leaving families exposed to the elements and entirely uprooted.
This is not an isolated error by overzealous local officials. It is a pattern.
Imagine a legal system as an umbrella. For most citizens, it offers protection from the storm of arbitrary power. But in Balochistan, that umbrella has been systematically shredded. The BYC points out that these demolitions occur entirely outside the framework of Pakistan's own constitutional guarantees. No warrants. No court dates. No right of appeal.
When a state punishes an entire family for the alleged actions or political stances of one individual, it abandons the principle of personal responsibility. It uses homelessness as a weapon of terror. The burning, looting, and flattening of homes have quieted some regions, but they have ignited deep, enduring resentment in others. From the suburbs of Karachi to the villages of Tump, Panwan, and the desolate stretches of Mastung, the script remains identical.
The silence that follows the roar of the bulldozers is perhaps the most devastating part of the narrative. Pakistan’s mainstream political parties rarely speak of Jiwani. The national media looks away. The institutions designed to protect human rights remain profoundly, calculatedly quiet.
What remains is a landscape of concrete dust and fractured communities, where innocence is no defense against a bulldozer.
