In Gilgit-Baltistan and Chitral, justice eludes the poor while privilege is reserved for the powerful
by Fazal Saadi
On October 17, a teenaged boy from the remote Darodass village in Ishkoman Valley of Ghizer District, left home and never returned. His family waited for two days before filing an FIR at the Immit police station. Yet no search was launched. Six days later, it was not the police but villagers who found the missing boy’s body barely two kilometres from his home, in a place they had already searched.
When the grief stricken family was allowed to see the body of Imtiaz, 17, there were no visible sign of injuries, except a few scratches on his back. No post-mortem was conducted, no forensic investigation followed, yet the case was swiftly declared a suicide. Officials whispered that the victim’s family was “too poor” to demand an autopsy, while rumours spread that political leaders had asked the police to close the matter. The family’s grief has been compounded by poverty, fear and powerlessness. The police told them unabashedly that unless they named a suspect, nothing could be done. In the end, the authorities did not even ask how or why he died.
Imtiaz’s tragic death is not an isolated or unique case. Within the small jurisdiction of the Immit police station, covering barely a dozen villages with over 10,000 population, five other suspicious deaths have occurred during the last six months. A man from Belhanz was found dead last month; a woman from Bazaar Khoto and a man from Nasirabad in September; another man from Immit in May, and a woman from Dowardas in December last year. Each case quietly closed, each life quickly forgotten. Civil society and political activists keep mum, the media rarely reaches these valleys, and families too poor to fight are left to bury not only their dead but their unanswered questions.
Elsewhere, the silence is no less chilling. Earlier in September this year, Raja Kashan, a student from Yasin, was found dead under questionable circumstances on a riverbank in Gilgit after an alleged abduction and assault by his peers.
In Upper Chitral, a 22-year-old woman, Shehla, took her life after harassment and blackmail, sparking protest in August. These names are not just statistics; they are stark reminder of how fragile life becomes when state fails to protect its citizens.
Digital harassment and gender-based violence against young boys, girls and women have risen alarmingly in Gilgit-Baltistan and Chitral
Digital harassment and gender-based violence against young boys, girls and women have risen alarmingly in Gilgit-Baltistan and Chitral. When examined together, the data reveals a troubling pattern. Between October 2024 and September 2025, police in Ghizer, Gilgit, and Hunza districts recorded 44 cases of gender-based violence. Yet in Nagar, not a single case was reported –a silence that appears to reflect fear and under-reporting rather than the absence of violence. In Chitral, a local civil society organisation documented 203 cases of gender-based violence filed between 2023 and 2025; fewer than two-thirds have reached a verdict, with many cases delayed for years, underscoring the slow and inaccessible justice process that survivors are forced to navigate.
The FIA’s cybercrime wing in Gilgit has received 145 online harassment complaints since 2023, many involving the blackmail of young women. The Child Protection Unit in the capital city has recorded over 30 cases of child abuse since 2021, ranging from sexual exploitation to trafficking, corporal punishment, and adolescent suicides linked to academic and social pressures.
Behind each number lies a pattern of neglect: police without training or tools, courts mired in inordinate delay, and child protection units that document abuse but leave the poverty-stricken stigmatised families to fend for themselves. In this vacuum, jirgas and village councils fill the gap where “reconciliation” outweighs justice, and honour outweighs truth.
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Violence in Gilgit-Baltistan and Chitral is not merely “traditional” or “cultural.” It is structural. It is about power who controls land, labour, and bodies. The state’s silence in these cases is not passive; it is complicit. By refusing investigation, denying autopsies, abandoning victims and their families, it reinforces the hierarchies of class, gender, and generation that sustain violence. When poor boys in Darodass are written off as suicides without evidence, when women are told to reconcile, when child abuse is brushed aside as custom, the message is clear: justice is a privilege and not a right. The system is broken and unable to protect people.
Why is the system so fragile? The answer lies in the colonial governance system and political economy of Gilgit-Baltistan. Without constitutional rights, provincial autonomy, or a functional Local Government system, institutions operate as extensions of the Establishment, not as services for citizens. Budgets for justice, health, and child protection remain negligible, while security expenditures consume resources without providing genuine safety.
Once managed under two districts, Gilgit-Baltistan now has over a dozen, but its capacity for justice has only shrunk. The absence of even basic post-motem services in Imtiaz’s case is not an oversight; it is systemic neglect, designed to keep the marginalised invisible.
Imtiaz’s family is asking for nothing extraordinary, only a fair and transparent investigation. The fact that even this modest demand remains unanswered speaks volumes about the state of justice in Gilgit-Baltistan, and in Pakistan at large. His death must not fade into another statistic buried in police files. This is not merely a local tragedy. It is a test of the state’s conscience. will it finally serve the people, or remain an instrument of suppression?
Until justice is treated as a right, not a privilege, until the poor, the remote, and the young are entitled to truth and accountability, the valleys of Gilgit-Baltistan and Chitral will continue to bury their children, men and women in silence, indignity and justice.
Fazal Saadi hails from Gilgit-Baltistan’s Ishkoman Valley. He is a development practitioner and researcher whose work focuses on the poverty and inequality challenges generated by neoliberal development processes.
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