Last Monday, in Wahdat Colony on Brewery Road, Quetta, a man sat down and recorded a video. By the time anyone watched it, it was already too late for the information in it to matter to the people it was about. Muhammad Asif, an employee of the Balochistan Civil Secretariat, shot his wife Bibi Zainab, then his son Huzaifa, at fourteen. His daughters are Hoorain, twelve, and Alina, six. Then Maharna, his youngest, who was eighteen months old. Then he turned the gun on himself.
In the video, Asif named two senior officers of the Secretariat. He said they had been threatening him to vacate the government house his family had lived in for years. He appealed directly to Chief Minister Sarfraz Bugti to take notice. And notice was indeed taken. Within hours, Bugti ordered an inquiry. Officials, including Under Secretary Aftab Jabal, Director of Industries Iqbal Sarparah and Saeed Mengal, were picked up for questioning.
Sit with that sequence for a second. A man's complaint against bureaucratic harassment produced nothing while he was alive to make it. The same complaint, recorded on a phone and surfacing after those bodies were found, produced arrests by morning. That gap is the actual story here. Not Asif's despair, although that matters. The distance between a living man's grievance and a dead man's video is where this whole tragedy lives, and it is a distance that should make all of us uncomfortable.
The House as Leverage
Start with the house, because the house is doing more work in this story than it is being given credit for. Government quarters in Pakistan run on a logic that looks like security and functions like leverage. A family gets allotted a house tied to a grade and a department's goodwill. Children grow up there; they go to nearby schools, they know the neighbours, and the mohalla knows them. For a lower-grade civil servant, that house is his whole life. There is no second property waiting in the wings, no savings cushion that covers Quetta's private rental market on a Secretariat salary.
If Asif had simply disappeared one day, swallowed into Quetta's underclass with whatever family he had left, those two officers would likely still be at their desks today, and nobody outside Wahdat Colony would know their names. So when an eviction threat lands on a desk like that, it is the dreaded question, 'Where do five people sleep safely next month?', asked by someone with no real answer.
The Power Gap
Now add the power gap. Asif was being pressured, by his own account, by officers senior to him in the same department. In a sarkari hierarchy, there is no real mechanism for a junior employee to file a grievance against the people who control his housing, his transfers, and his service record. Who does he complain to? The people he would be complaining about, most likely. The system has no door for this kind of dispute, which means the pressure just compounds, quietly, for however long it takes.
Here is where it gets darker. Asif did not leave. He did not pack up and go stay with relatives while he fought the eviction, which is what an outsider might expect from someone facing housing pressure. He killed his family first. This is the part that gets flattened into 'tragedy' and left there, but it deserves more. In households built on the idea that a man's failure is the family's shame, and that a man's family is an extension of his own standing rather than five separate people with their own futures, losing the house is not just his loss. It is framed in his mind as something that would happen to them, a humiliation he would be inflicting on people who depend on him.
Some men, faced with that framing, choose to take their families with them rather than 'abandon' them to a future of diminishment. It is not protection per se, but it is experienced as protection, which is its own kind of horror. And it is a pattern that repeats across these cases with a consistency that should worry us more than it does.
The Video's Awful Faith
And then there is the video itself, which I keep coming back to. Asif used his last moments not to explain himself to his family, but to build a case against two officers, for an audience he knew would eventually exist. That is a strange kind of faith, really: faith that a recording would do what a living complaint never could. The unbearable, mortifying, heartbreaking thing is that he was right. The inquiry and arrests exist because of the video, period. If Asif had simply disappeared one day, swallowed into Quetta's underclass with whatever family he had left, those two officers would likely still be at their desks today, and nobody outside Wahdat Colony would know their names.
We now have a documented case of a Pakistani government responding to a citizen's grievance against its own officials only once that citizen, and four children with him, were no longer alive to benefit from the response. Whatever inquiry follows this, however many officials are eventually held accountable, none of it changes what that sequence teaches every other low-grade employee currently sitting on a similar eviction notice somewhere in this country. That is the lesson Quetta just taught the state about itself, and it is one we should all be far more frightened by than we currently seem to be.
