Abdul Khaliq operated a Heidelberg cylinder press in a narrow alley running behind Liaquat Bazar in the center of Quetta. He was fifty-two years old and had spent his life managing the machinery of provincial bureaucracy and social obligation. His daily work consisted of printing wedding invitations on thick, gold-embossed cardstock for local government officials and rolling out thousands of standard-issue school certificates for the provincial education board. The press was a heavy, rhythmic machine that dictated the heartbeat of the alleyway, smelling constantly of industrial solvents and sweet black ink. On the second Tuesday of December 2005, the utility of his machine shifted entirely. Khaliq wiped the rollers clean of their decorative green ink. He threaded a heavy roll of cheap, gray newsprint into the feed. Three students from the University of Balochistan had arrived at his shop two hours after sunset carrying a wax stencil. The winter cold in Quetta that evening was severe enough to freeze the condensation on the shop windows. The students carried no money to pay for the print run. Khaliq did not ask for payment. He locked the shop doors from the inside, started the generator to bypass the scheduled electrical load-shedding, and ran off five hundred copies of a single sheet of paper. The paper contained four lines of anonymously authored poetry and a short list of political demands. He boxed the damp sheets in discarded fruit cartons.

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Habib Jalib recited “Dastoor” for the first time in 1962, at a public gathering in Lahore, as a direct response to General Ayub Khan’s new constitution. The Radio Pakistan authorities removed his voice from the airwaves. PTV, whose predecessor Pakistan Television launched in 1964, placed him on a blacklist that remained operative into the Zia era. Under General Zia ul-Haq, Jalib was detained multiple times: in 1976, three days after the death of his twelve-year-old son, law enforcement surrounded his house in Hyderabad and arrested him in what became known as the Hyderabad Conspiracy Case, alongside Khan Abdul Wali Khan, Mir Ghaus Bakhsh Bizenjo, Attaullah Mengal, and Khair Bakhsh Marri. He was held without trial. He died on March 13, 1993, in Lahore, without regular income, without a pension, without a permanent address he owned. He was buried in Shah Fareed Graveyard, Sabzazar. The state that imprisoned him gave him the Nishan-e-Imtiaz posthumously in 2009.

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In the summer of 1972, the Lahore police entered a small room in the Taxali Gate neighbourhood and arrested its occupant on charges of terrorism. The occupant was Chiragh Deen, known across Punjab as Ustad Daman, born 3 September 1911, the son of a tailor, a man who had been reciting resistance poetry at public gatherings since before Partition and who had never in his life published a single collection of his verse. The charge was possession of a bomb. The bomb was planted. The government that ordered it was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party. The year was 1972. The poem that prompted the arrest had been recited at a public gathering in Lahore days earlier, and it mocked Bhutto by name for flying to Shimla to sign an agreement with Indira Gandhi after having campaigned on the slogan that Pakistan would fight India for a thousand years. Daman had spent his life in that room. He refused to leave it even when Nehru had offered him asylum before Partition, when rioters burned his shop and killed his wife and daughter. He refused to leave it when Faiz Ahmad Faiz came to visit him weeks before Faiz’s own death in 1984 and found him ill on the floor. The police knew exactly where to find him.

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On the evening of June 1, 2011, Professor Saba Dashtyari walked home along Sariab Road in Quetta after teaching a Balochi language class at the University of Balochistan. His student, Sakim Sukun, was beside him. Unidentified gunmen opened fire. Dashtyari was rushed to hospital. He did not survive. He was 57 years old. He left behind 24 documented books in Balochi, poetry collections, short story volumes, linguistic histories, literary indexes, a 50-year bibliography of Balochi literature he had compiled by hand across decades, and a library in Malir, Karachi, housing 16,000 volumes on Balochi civilisation, which he had built from his own salary and six years of travel across four continents asking for donations. None of his books are indexed in the Pakistan Academy of Letters catalogue. None appear on Rekhta, the largest online archive of South Asian literary work. Balochi is not in the national curriculum. Hours after his death, a previously unknown group calling itself Ansarul Islam telephoned the Quetta Press Club to claim responsibility. The hundreds who marched to Mewashah graveyard for his burial rejected the claim unanimously. No prosecution followed. The government of President Asif Ali Zardari made no public statement naming a responsible party. The University of Balochistan closed for one day of mourning and reopened.

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