Political Indifference and State Complicity: The Travails of Hazaras in Balochistan

Pakistan is a forbidding place for minorities—confessional, sectarian and ideological. Violence, direct and structural and exacted with eerie regularity has ghettoised minority communities and forced them to flee. Among them, no other community is being subjected to such annihilatory violence as the Hazaras in the Balochistan province. Hazaras are an ethnic group predominantly based in Afghanistan, but also with a sizeable population in Pakistan, with estimates ranging between 650,000 and 900,000. The majority of Hazaras in Pakistan live in the city of Quetta, the provincial capital of Balochistan. While some Hazaras are Sunni, the majority identify as Shia.