In the region, organizers of a rights movement are pitted against the Pakistan’s army, amid reports of extra judicial killings and human rights abuses.

Following the incident top leaders of PTM were detained.

However, the military of the country have denied crackdown against the PTM.

“In the past, they wanted to stop protests. Now they want to stop the movement,” Pashteen, who says he is the only member of the group’s core leadership not in custody, told Reuters news agency.

“They have directly arrested the leadership and begun a campaign to malign them (on social media),” he alleges.

Who are the Pashtun people?

The Pashtuns are the world's largest segmented-lineage ethnic group having clans ranging from about 350 to over 400.

With a population of at least 50 million, the Pashtun people are Afghanistan's largest ethnic group.

They are also considered as the second-largest ethnicity in Pakistan.

The memebers of the coummunity are united by the Pashto language.

However, many of them speak Dari (Persian) or Urdu.

These people are also commonly known as "Pathans".

Interestingly, these people follow millenniums old traditional Pashtun cultural code of ‘Pashtunwali’ or ‘Pathanwali'.

These acts as standards for individual and communal behavior.

Notable Pashtun rulers of the Lodi Dynasty had ruled large empires stretching from Afghanistan to northern India during the Delhi Sultanate period (1206-1526). The Lodi Dynasty (1451- 1526) was the final of the five Delhi sultanates and was later defeated by Babur, who founded the Mughal Empire in India.

A matter to be noted is that most Pashtuns today are Sunni Muslims.

Although they form a small minority which is Shia.

Thus, some aspects of Pashtunwali seem to derive from Muslim law and the worship of a single god- Allah.

This demanded nation would have been carved from the Pashtun-dominated areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

This idea, which has been a national movement in the region predating the creation of Pakistan, remains alive among hardline Pashtun nationalists as they have been subjected to random crackdown from the Pakistani government machinery. 

The current crisis

According to an article in New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation (ORF),  Pashtuns have stirred up a storm again and the Pakistan army is now desperate to control it.

"The DG ISPR, Asif Ghafoor, the spokesperson for the Pakistan army, recently suggested that the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement receives funding from the Indian and Afghan intelligence services and ‘warned’ the Pashtun population to not take heed of the movement’s rhetoric.

"The statement is unsurprising and predictable, given that Pakistan has always looked to place the blame on someone else, for problems of their own creation," according to the ORF article.

According to the article, Pakistan accuses arch rival India and its western neighbour Afghanistan of stoking ethno-national sentiments within its nation as Pakistan has always prioritized the Abrahamic religion of Islam and the language of Urdu among all its people across diverse geographical and demographic groups. This in fact led to the breaking up of Pakistan and the creation of  Bengali-speaking  Bangladesh in 1971 with military and humanitarian help from India.

The creation of Bangladesh sowed the seeds of mistrust in the mind of Pakistan and cemented the idea that India might repeat its act of breaking up Pakistan on ethno-national lines.

But unlike the movements in Balochistan, movements such as the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM) is difficult for India to support because the movement has been successful only due to the absence of foreign-state funding and support, and its potential to backfire in terms of increased support for Kashmiri and Khalistan militants cannot be ruled out.

The Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM), or the Pashtun Protection Movement, is a social movement for Pashtun human rights based Pakistan.

The movement was founded in May 2014 by eight students at Gomal University with an initiative for removing landmines from Waziristan and other parts of the former Federally Administered Tribal Areas, affected by the war in North-West Pakistan.

According to media reports, days after the initiative started, the movement gained international attention in January last year when it began a justice movement for one Naqeebullah Mehsud, who was extrajudicially killed in a fake encounter staged by the a senior police officer in Karachi,  and since then it has gained international press coverages for subsequent human rights protests in the area.

PTM demands removal of random check posts and landmines that are scattered across the tribal belt, a return of missing people and set up of a fair judicial inquiry to find those who have been picked up by the Pakistan military over the years and bring an end to the military subjugation of their home.

Even though PTM is apparently an entirely non-violent movement and claims to be an unarmed and peaceful resistance working within the lawful boundaries of Constitution of Pakistan, the Pakistan Army and several journalists have claimed that the movement is trying to create discord in the country along ethnic lines, as well as following a foreign agenda as the movement has seen strong support from Afghanistan.
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Post 9/11 "war on terror"

The Pashtuns have been bearing the brunt of the so-called US’s post 9/11 "war on terror" for nearly two decades. With the NATO invasion of Afghanistan, members of terror groups operating in that country crossed the mountainous border to Pakistan and took refuge in the Pashtuns dominated tribal areas.

In response the Pakistani military, under pressure from US, started carrying out operations within its borders to clear the area from terrorists, media reports said.

Ironically, rather than stopping terrorist activity, military operations in the area increasingly victimized innocent Pashtuns across Pakistan who were stereotyped as terrorists even though they themselves were victims of terrorism.

Rather than addressing the genuine grievances expressed by this growing movement, the Pakistani military did everything it can to muzzle the movement; from stopping reporting on the movement's gatherings to the repeated arrests of its members and leaders.

According to media reports, the leaders were prevented from entering parts of Pakistan where they wanted to hold rallies and some barred from leaving the country.

Reports of alleged rape by Pakistan's army

A major change in the region was seen recently when a delegation of well-known women’s rights political activists visited Waziristan to assess the situation on-ground where sexual abuse and harassment of women by the Pakistani military  were reported.

According to media reports, the region had wintessed atrocities against women rampantly.

However, it is the first time that the women are coming forward themselves, and it is mainly because of the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement which has given the women the courage to speak up.

In a recent video by a political activist from the Swat Valley (an area where Nobel Laureate Malala Yousafzai belongs), a local claimed that over a thousand of women were abducted by the military while conducting operations in his region.

Local women’s rights activists agree with this assessment, but once again, the cases are almost never documented, because the families of such victims do not come forward due to fear of the powerful Pakistan Army, and the ‘honour code’, reported The Quint.

In th region, most of the household do not have much male members left as they have gone 'missing'due to conflict.

And therefore, it is imperative that the soldiers be held accountable for such abuse, and that a mechanism is built to involve women in the security forces when it comes to dealing with such vulnerable sections of society, reported Taha Siddiqui, an award-winning Pakistani journalist living in exile in France.