For the past many years, Balochistan has been in the grip of a low-intensity conflict, and has experienced four insurgencies since Independence. While separatist groups continue to carry out attacks on security forces, human rights organisations have expressed concern about a growing number of missing persons cases and human rights violations. In more recent times, the ethnic Shia minority has been particularly vulnerable, with more than 500 members of the Hazara community killed in targeted attacks over the years.

Amid the insurgency and sectarian violence, the province, Pakistan’s largest in terms of land mass, has also become inhospitable for foreign journalists and a dangerous place for local journalists, at least 40 of whom have been killed, according to unofficial reports.

In 2014, Reporters Without Borders ranked Khuzdar, the capital of Khuzdar district in central Balochistan, among the world’s 10 most dangerous cities for journalists. The same year, Amnesty International described the area as a “graveyard for journalists”, after at least six media persons were murdered in Khuzdar and 21 in the province in the preceding few years. Among them were two of the local press club’s presidents and its general secretary.

There are currently a total of five women journalists working in Balochistan. All of them work in TV news. There is not a single woman covering news for the province’s local version of the national newspapers, or the local newspapers.

This figure is disproportionately low compared to the rest of the country. While female journalists are far from being treated as equals across Pakistan, their counterparts in Balochistan deal with additional structural, political, cultural and economic issues that have kept them on the margins of the profession.

Stuck between life and death

“No story is worth dying for,” said Shahmeer Baloch, a Pakistan correspondent for The Guardian. “Many journalists from Balochistan have gone into exile”, leaving the country after being threatened. Women journalists say the province is especially inhospitable to them.

“They [the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan] said they’d kill us if any woman [reporter] comes on camera,” said Sadia Jahangir, 39, an assignment editor at Dunya News’ local bureau in Balochistan. She went off-camera in the late 2000s after the TTP issued threats to media channels, a recurring tactic of the proscribed group to muzzle journalists.

Bushra Qamar, the first woman bureau chief for GTV news channel from Balochistan said the province is a conflict zone where ‘soft reporting’ is easy but many journalists have lost their lives after covering terrorism and operations by security forces.

Across the country, broadcast journalism was thriving in the 2000s after former military dictator Pervez Musharraf liberalised the airwaves in Pakistan and several privately-owned news channels appeared in the country.

It became a motivation for aspiring women to join newscasting. “At the time I thought only anchors are journalists. Dressing up and reading the news in front of the cameras was the job,” said Jahangir. She added that journalists face pressure from courts, the government and insurgent groups. The TTP, she said, dictated what news could be broadcasted at the time.

My journey from Balochistan

Like Jahangir, I grew up in Balochistan and dreamed of becoming a journalist. I knew it wouldn’t be an easy career, and while there were plenty of women in my journalism classes at Sardar Bahadur Khan (SBK) Women’s University, I knew there weren’t many women’s bylines in the newspapers I read, or women reporting news on the television newscasts I watched. I also knew how difficult it was for any journalist — male or female — to report the news without interference and that some of them put their lives on the line trying to do so.

Then, a story in The New York Times about a degree scam in Pakistan by Declan Walsh led to the arrest of culprits behind the multimillion-dollar fraud. Axact, claiming to be an IT company, had been allegedly selling fake degrees worldwide from a ‘call centre’ in Karachi undetected for over a decade. The scam reportedly caused people, some who were aware they were buying fake degrees and others who were tricked into believing they were obtaining legitimate online degrees, into losing thousands of dollars, and in one case up to $400,000.

It was the first time I understood the power of investigative reporting. I decided to become an investigative journalist. I got my first real taste of what that would be like while reporting for Balochistan Voices, an online newspaper, as an intern during my college years. I tried reporting on the sexual harassment scandal that surfaced at the University of Balochistan in 2019, but many of the female students were too afraid to talk to me. I worked on another story about threats to women journalists. I didn’t get very far with it, but it made me realise how dire the situation was for these women.

Their plight stuck with me even after I moved to the United States to study investigative journalism at Arizona State University on a Fulbright scholarship. And so I reached out to Qamar to speak to her about the challenges female journalists face in the field. She provided me with the names of the four women braving the minefield for journalists.

I spoke to them and I decided to keep writing about them.

Risks to safety in the field

Attiya Akram, 39, is a reporter for ARY News’ local bureau. She was covering protests against the disappearance of Baloch missing persons in the late 2000s when several protesters began pointing her out and accusing her of being linked to security agencies, which have been accused of gross rights violations in the province.

Her cameraperson, who had seen guns in the crowd, grew worried. He spoke up, telling the crowd she was a journalist. It was one of the many close calls she experienced during her 17 years covering news in the province.

Jahangir of Dunya News said she was reporting from the Bolan Medical College Hospital after a bomb blast at SBK Women’s University in 2013, when the perpetrators opened fire at the hospital, hoping to finish off any survivors. “We managed to escape with difficulty,” she said.

Foreign female journalists also report harrowing experiences from their time working in the province. Carlotta Gall, a correspondent for The New York Times, visited Balochistan in 2006, on a reporting trip when unidentified persons entered her hotel room in Quetta, the capital city of Balochistan, confiscated her equipment and beat her up.

“I was warned you are not supposed to come here; you are not to talk to the Taliban,” she told C-SPAN in 2014.“The Pakistanis were basically telling me ‘get out of town (Quetta) and don’t come back’. The situation was so grave that the journalists in that town were told to stop working with foreign journalists,” she said.

Treatment from co-workers

Women say they face another kind of danger in their newsrooms — from managers who harass them and colleagues who either treat them with disdain or simply look the other way.

Ayesha*, who did not wish to be named for fear of being targeted, was working as an assignment editor for a local bureau of a TV news channel. She wrote a script for a news package on inflation that didn’t turn out the way her bureau chief wanted. He began cursing and yelling at her. “You don’t know how to work,” he screamed. “You are a woman and that’s how women are.”

The argument turned into a physical fight. “He held me by the collar and pulled me,” Ayesha said, “then I slapped him”. The bureau chief ended up staying at the station. But she resigned, became a lecturer and never returned to journalism.

The senior journalists told her: “You are a woman, so you’ll be able to find a job, whereas as a man, he cannot since he already got this job with difficulty.”

Beyond newsrooms, these problems followed into the field as well. Male cameramen would refuse to go with Ayesha on reporting assignments during her first reporting job at a TV news channel. She would complain to her bureau chief but nothing changed.

Aqsa Mir, a reporter who switched from Dunya news TV to 92 News, said she felt unsafe in her newsroom. There were cameras to keep track of employees’ movements. “If we would eat something on our desks, they would cut our salaries,” she said. If she was busy elsewhere and didn’t answer her phone, she would get into trouble.

Mir said her bureau chief also pressured her to vote for him in an election for a journalists’ association in Balochistan. When she refused, she lost her privileges to a car that picked and dropped off reporters from assignments. Not the least of her concerns was the lack of a separate toilet for women in the newsroom.

Work assignments and the wage gap

Female TV journalists in Balochistan say they are also paid less than their male counterparts, and low salaries keep them hopping from one station to another in search of a slightly better salary. Sidra Arif, switched from PTV, a government-owned media network, to Dunya News, a privately-owned news organisation because the state-owned entity failed to pay her at all.

She got a 16 per cent raise when she moved, she said, but she soon learned that a male in the same job was making more, even though he worked fewer hours than she did. “I was shocked when I found out and I just wanted to leave,” Arif said. She ended up moving again, this time to the Bol News TV channel, where as an assignment editor, she could earn slightly more.

Some women said they worked for no money at all, at least at the start of their careers as unpaid interns. All of the women journalists from Balochistan agreed that female journalists working elsewhere in Pakistan make more money. But they were wary of asking for raises they expected or believed they deserved for fear that their requests would be rejected and would hurt their careers. Mir said women who ask for raises are invariably told that if they aren’t happy with their pay, they could go find another job.

Cultural expectations

After her parents died, Jahangir’s eldest brother and her sisters supported her while she pursued a degree in journalism. After she got married, her husband, himself a journalist, allowed her to continue working in broadcast journalism. Others don’t have that kind of support among their family members.

Arif worked behind the camera for 16 years, in part because her relatives thought that being on camera would affect her marriage prospects. She didn’t go on camera until after marriage — with the consent of her husband: “He said that ‘she is my wife and it’s a matter between us’.”

Maryam Zia Baloch, a social activist from Balochistan, said there is resistance in Balochistan to women pursuing careers.“The only profession where women are working in Balochistan is medicine,” she said. “When you’re growing up, you also look around and see what else I can be. You don’t have examples. You don’t have people working as journalists. So the idea gets shunned at the very beginning.”

For Akram, of ARY News, the discrimination faced by women in workplaces is emblematic of society’s attitudes towards the female gender in general. “Men are expected to be breadwinners and women are expected to attend to family duties. Sons are prized more than daughters.”

As a child, she felt that her father always wanted to have a son. She decided to try to make him proud through her work. “He had tears in his eyes when he saw me on camera for the first time,” she said.

Slowly but surely, societal norms are beginning to shift. “With the advent of TikTok and social media, everything has changed,” said Arif. But the culture in newsrooms, particularly with regard to women’s safety, leaves a lot to be desired.

*The former journalist’s name has been changed due to security concerns.

Header illustration: Journalist taking photo of a hand holding a rifle. — PCH.Vector/Shutterstock