On 24 January 2026, Judge Muhammad Afzal Majoka sentenced lawyers Imaan Mazari and Hadi Ali Chattha to 17 years’ imprisonment for social media posts criticising the state. The court alleged their advocacy for victims in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa promoted the ideologies of proscribed groups like the BLA and TTP. This judgment is viewed as a tactical move to grant the Pakistan Army impunity and silence those questioning military highhandedness. Experts warn that criminalising such dissent erodes the "grey area" necessary for constructive dialogue, potentially fuelling further political extremism and deepening the gulf between the state and its citizens.
In yet another major development in Pakistan on 24 January 2026, a session court in Pakistan sentenced human rights activists and lawyers Imaan Mazari and Hadi Ali Chattha to 17 years of imprisonment on charges that were brought against the duo for their social media posts. According to reports, the cases were filed in August 2025 by a Sub-Inspector, accusing Imaan of disseminating “offensive, misleading and anti-state content” on social media with Mr Chattha’s “active connivance”.
Since filing of the case, various hearings of the case were conducted, an unusual thing in countries like Pakistan where hearing of several important cases remain pending. Imaan and Chattha were also arrested and granted bails. On 29 October, for example, Chattha was arrested from the court premises in Islamabad for not reaching the court before the scheduled 2pm hearing. On 5 November, Additional Sessions Judge Muhammad Afzal Majoka issued an arrest warrant against Imaan and Chattha for failing to appear in court. They were granted bail by the same judge on 9 November.
The case took a major turn on 15 January when Judge Majoka cancelled the bail of the duo for non-appearance in the court. The judge took the police to task, stating that the failure of the police to execute warrants in Islamabad raised serious concerns about the credibility of the law-enforcing agency. He directed the DIG to arrest Imaan and Chattha “from anywhere — whether in Pakistan, India or Afghanistan,” or “at sea or in the air”, but they must be brought to the court within 24 hours.
Eventually, on 24 January, Judge Majoka sentenced the duo, stating that “From perusal of the tweets, re-tweets and posts of accused persons it follows that they have stated the Pakistan as terrorist state, the detention under section 11-EEE of ATA as illegal detention and have praised proscribed organisations and individual and claimed the judiciary as biased.” Overlooking the important aspect in the history and practice of law, what is known as “circumstantial evidence” through which it could be easily established that the essence of the activities of Imaan and Chattha is to question the highhandedness of the state forces against its own citizens and raise the issue, a reality often invoked by the Pakistani judiciary from time to time to bring the guilty to justice, the judgment seems a signal that the space for dissent voices is being further shrunk in Pakistan.
Dissent a crime?
Lending support to the oppressed people of a state or victims of the state's highhandedness has become unfashionable in modern politics. In the present populist times, labelling has become a tool of the governments and their supporters to delegitimise dissent or muffle opponent voices.
Pakistan is following the same tactics. Why would, otherwise, voices like Imaan and Chhata be targets of the Pakistani State when they do not support any anti-State narrative or support any ideology specifically? Their activities or raising the issues of the people of Balochistan or Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP) or others would not count as a major threat to the law and order situation in Pakistan. In fact, by co-opting such voices, the state can delegitimise groups like BLA and TTP and erode their support, if they have any. Instead of that, it seems the authorities are bent on pushing these sensible voices on the other side.
A simple analysis of the Balochistan Chief Minister Sardar Bugti’s press conference about the recent attacks in Balochistan sets the parameters about what the state is going to allow. Sarfaraz Bugti claimed that these terrorists do not enjoy any support base; on the other hand, he threatened the families whose kin join the Baloch militants but do not inform the state about it. Thus, he invokes the “collective punishment”, a contradiction to his own claims.
Enough evidence and documents exist, and many commentators in Pakistan have argued that the province has faced relative deprivation. And there are genuine demands that need to be addressed.
In his presser, Chief Minister Bugti also claimed that never has force (military operation) been used in Balochistan. This has been his claim (though untrue) for quite some time. In fact, in late 2024, when he had given a similar statement, a senior journalist, Hamid Mir, had written a long piece in Jang, tracing the number of times force was used against the Baloch and also betrayals that the Baloch have suffered at the hands of rulers in Pakistan. Mir wrote, “the betrayal meted out to Nawab Nauroz Khan (Around the 1960s) continues till this day.”
Bugti tried to separate the issue of deprivation and violence in Balochistan, stating that “They purely want to impose their ideology on us with the force of guns and push the Baloch into a futile war. […] You are linking this war with deprivation and rationalising this violence too.” That is a fair point.
If there is no link, why are the Baloch protesting then? If groups like the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) are violent, what about the Baloch Yekjehti Committee (BYC)? It has never supported violence. How to explain the violence suffered by the Bloch and their supporters when they were marching towards Islamabad in December 2023? How to explain the targeting of BYC and the arrest of its leaders when they had never picked up arms? On the one hand, various reports and the Human Rights Groups, including the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), have time and again said that human rights violations have taken place in Balochistan and on the other, the Pakistani State appears busy in delegitimising and punishing the voices that raise and bring the issue to the public.
Punishing Imaan and Chattha seems to be part of the same tactics to change the narrative and delegitimise genuine voices and grievances of the Baloch people. The tweets of Imaan and their retweeting by Chattha were linked and said to be promoting the ideology of BLA, a separatist group fighting for Balochistan’s separation from Pakistan and the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a terrorist group fighting against the Pakistani State. The confluence of the two ideologies itself is a serious and tactical move to demoralize and delegitimize the premise of Imaan and Chhata to raise the voice of the oppressed people in Balochistan and other areas that remain prone to violence.
Imaan and Chhata have been the voices of the people who have suffered at the hands of Pakistani military, which has misappropriated the authority of the State. These two gave voices to, and represented, the people subjected to enforced disappearances in Balochistan, atrocities committed against the Baloch students in various universities across the country and pointed out the Pakistan Army’s brutal use of force against the citizens of Pakistan, particularly in Balochistan.
The judgment of Judge Muhammad Afzal Makoka read that “Both the accused persons portrayed the armed forces as being responsible for the act of terrorism in the country and alleged that the state and its institutions are working in collusion with the proscribed individuals and organisations,” like the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) and the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Both BLA and TTP are at war with the Pakistan State, while the former operates mainly in Balochistan, the latter questions the nature of the existing state, calling it not Islamic enough; Imaan and Chhata are lending their support to the innocent victims of the state's highhandedness while it is fighting groups like TTP and BLA. Imaan and Chhata do not expect or seek justice from BLA or TTP but from the Pakistan judiciary. They believe and recognise the judiciary as supreme; they are not questioning the Pakistani State.
New pattern
Questioning the intentions of dissenting voices and equating their arguments with the armed groups aim to create confusion among the common people about the entire issue of human rights and second, to erode the space for dissent in Pakistan.
Two factors seem operational in the cases of Imaan and Chhata. One, it is not that important whether Imaan and Chhata or groups like BYC lend voice to the victims of the State's highhandedness; it is important that the institution that is being accused of committing these atrocities— the all-powerful Pakistan Army— needs to pushed back. To punish such voices is to deliver a larger message— do not dare go against the most powerful institution of the country. It is grant the Army impunity for its misdeeds.
Second, punishing figures like Imaan and Chhata is to set an example for others to refrain from raising such issues or pointing fingers at the Pakistan Army. As an editorial in Dawn underlined it, “If such convictions stand, the message to lawyers, journalists and citizens alike is unmistakable: dissent will not merely be discouraged, it will be criminalised.”
The approach, however, seems self-defeating: Not only does it erode the space for registering protest and hold accountable persons who have committed such atrocities and clear the image of the Pakistan Army, but it also shrinks the grey area in Balochistan where groups like BYC and people like Imaan and Chhata can play a constructive role to bridge the widening gap between the state and local population. This policy, if continued, is likely to widen the growing gulf between the Pakistan State and the people in Balochistan and breed political extremism rather than gaining trust of the common people in Pakistan.
Dr Nazir Ahmad Mir is a Research Analyst in a MEA Project at MP-IDSA, New Delhi. He can be reached at: mirnazir.kash@gmail.com. The views expressed here are his own.
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