Appearance vs Reality: State’s manufacturing narrative behind Youth Empowerment in Balochistan
Manufacturing narratives has become an important practice of modern statecraft, particularly in the times when state confronts a political conflict that cannot be resolved through mere coercion. Counter insurgency, therefore, has never been confined to kinetic operations only. Alongside force, states have developed methods of social and political engagement designed to influence how populations understand the conflict, their own grievances, and the legitimacy of the state. The language of “winning hearts and minds” captures this broader approach. From classic to the modern counter insurgency practices like“wining hearts and mind” is playing a distinguished role in which the oppressors tend to hide their real intentions and tries to manufacture a consent: the oppressor is concerned in addressing grievances and uplifting the oppressed from their status quo. Development, employment, education, sports, cultural activities and all sorts of youth/community engagement initiatives become part of an attempt to manufacture consent and construct an artificially positive image of the oppressing state while blurring the reality.
This becomes particularly significant in Balochistan, where the Pakistani state has increasingly emphasized youth empowerment through employment schemes, skills development, entrepreneurship, sports, youth festivals, seminars, workshops, scholarships and other forms of engagement. These initiatives are generally presented as efforts to address the socioeconomic problems of Baloch youth and to bring them into the mainstream of national development. The state presents itself as it is opening the opportunities for a generation that has long suffered from poverty, unemployment, educational deprivation and limited economic opportunities. At the level of appearance, therefore, the message is clear: the state is investing in the youth and creating avenues through which they can build a better future. But these are nothing more than hallow attempts of narrative building that state is providing space to Baloch youth in order to defang and depoliticise them and snatch them from their agencies.
However, a more important question behind this visible narrative. What political narrative do these initiatives carry, and what kind of relationship between the Baloch youth and the state are they attempting to produce?
This question becomes necessary because youth policy does not operate in a political vacuum. It is being implemented in a region where an unresolved conflict exists between the Pakistani state and Baloch. The state is therefore not engaging an ordinary youth population in an ordinary developmental environment. It is engaging a population whose political consciousness is itself part of the conflict. In such a context, youth engagement cannot be understood only through the language used to describe it. Its political content and function must also be examined.
The state’s own policy documents provide an important starting point. The Balochistan Youth Policy does not restrict itself to employment, education and socioeconomic development. It explicitly connects youth development with preventing national consciousness, political question and promoting so called peace which is snatched by the state in first place. The policy therefore reveals that youth engagement has another objective alongside development. This is the point where the language of empowerment requires closer and cross examination.
The question arises is what happens when these initiatives are assembled within a wider political strategy. The answer becomes clearer when the content of these initiatives are examined as a whole. Across employment programs, skills trainings, entrepreneurship schemes, sports activities, festivals, seminars and youth development projects, the state repeatedly presents the same basic solution to the problems of Baloch youth: opportunity, participation and integration into the existing order. The problem emerges when a fundamentally political conflict is increasingly represented through a socioeconomic term. A political grievance can be transformed into a problem of unemployment. Alienation can be transformed into a lack of skills. Political discontent can be represented as the consequence of exposure to negative influences. This is where empowerment can become a mechanism of depoliticization. This gives “winning hearts and minds” a deeper meaning.
The most significant question, therefore, is not simply what the state gives to the youth, but what it asks them to leave behind. This is where the narrative becomes more consequential than the individual initiative. The state does not merely say, “We are giving you opportunities.” The deeper message can become: “Your progress is possible through us, while the political struggle around you is an obstacle to that progress.” This is almost the content and aim of every such initiative.
Such a narrative can gradually produce a particular kind of political subject: a young person who is encouraged to seek individual mobility while becoming alienated from collective political demands. The youth becomes a beneficiary of the state rather than an agent capable of questioning the state.
In reality, Balochistan displays a widely different image, where at the same time more particularly the youth is facing severe conditions than employment and skills. They are becoming victims of long cycle of enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests, restrictions on peaceful advocacy of educational and political rights. These realities do not simply constitute a separate human-rights question. They directly affect the meaning of youth empowerment which is construed by state; the perpetrator of these crimes. This produces the central contradiction in the state, so-called narrative of youth engagement/empowerment. The state seeks to empower the Baloch youth as economic and social subjects while containing them as political subjects. This is precisely why the language of “fake promises” needs to be understood carefully. And appearance and reality therefore exist simultaneously.
The appearance is that the state is solving the problems of Baloch youth through development, employment, education, skills and opportunity. But, the deeper political reality, from this perspective, is that these initiatives can also function to manage the political consciousness of that same youth, weaken the appeal of the Baloch political narrative and produce alternative forms of identity.
The question is what political narrative accompanies these initiatives. When youth empowerment is presented within a counter-insurgency environment, it can become a means of constructing an alternative political consciousness. The youth are encouraged to see their future through employment, entrepreneurship, education and state-supported participation, while the political causes of their collective grievances are pushed into the background. The state thereby attempts not merely to win the hearts and minds of young people, but to reshape the terms through which they understand their own condition.
The real question, therefore, is not simply whether Pakistan is empowering Baloch youth. It is what kind of youth it seeks to empower, what kind of political consciousness it seeks to cultivate, what forms of participation it considers legitimate, and what forms it seeks to neutralize. Therefore The appearance is empowerment through which it is trying to inject fake narratives to convince the targeted audiences and also mislead the youth with the help of fake promises behind the wider program of narratives building and counter insurgency.