By Aleezeh Fatima

 

The story meeting is wrapping up.

Someone pitches a report from Balochistan. Another suggests a feature on women in Gilgit-Baltistan. A third mentions a protest in a village in interior Sindh. The room is full of ideas about places that sit hundreds of kilometres away.

But there is no one at the table who comes from those places.

No one who grew up speaking the language was mentioned. No one knows the roads, the customs, or the unspoken rules of the communities being discussed. No one who can say, “That’s not the story,” or, “You’re missing something important.”

And so, decisions are made anyway.

This is how many stories about Pakistan’s indigenous communities begin, not with the people who know these places best, but with those looking at them from a distance.

For years, conversations about diversity in Pakistani media have focused on gender, and rightly so. But hidden within that conversation is another uncomfortable reality: indigenous women remain almost entirely absent from mainstream newsrooms. From Balochistan to former FATA, from the mountains of Gilgit-Baltistan to the villages of interior Sindh, their voices are rarely heard in editorial meetings, seldom seen on bylines, and almost never part of the decisions that shape how their communities are portrayed.

Their absence is not just a question of representation. It changes the stories we read, the people we hear from, and the version of Pakistan that is ultimately presented back to us.

Putting an exact number on Pakistan’s indigenous communities is difficult. Unlike countries such as Canada or Australia, Pakistan does not officially recognise “indigenous peoples” as a separate constitutional category, nor does its census collect data under that label.

The country’s most recent population census, the seventh and Pakistan’s first digital census, was conducted in 2023 and recorded a population of over 241.4 million people. While it provides data on language, ethnicity and geography, it does not identify how many Pakistanis belong to indigenous communities.

Estimates, however, suggest that up to 15 per cent of Pakistan’s population belongs to tribal or indigenous groups, including communities such as the Kalasha, the Brohi, the Sheedis, and numerous ethnic groups living across Balochistan, Gilgit-Baltistan, former FATA and interior Sindh.

The United Nations itself does not have a single, formal definition of indigenous peoples. Instead, it describes them as communities with distinct languages, cultures and social institutions that identify themselves as different from dominant sections of society and are determined to preserve their ancestral identities and ways of life. Self-identification, according to the UN, remains a fundamental criterion.

Yet despite Pakistan’s immense linguistic and cultural diversity, there is little data on how many indigenous people work in the country’s media industry, and even less on how many of them are women.

A Diversity Without a Name

Around the world, the term “indigenous peoples” is used to describe communities that have a deep historical connection to a particular land and have maintained distinct languages, cultures, knowledge systems and social institutions, often while existing outside dominant political and social structures. The United Nations does not have a single formal definition of indigeneity, but says indigenous peoples generally share a historical continuity with pre-colonial societies and identify themselves as culturally distinct communities. Self-identification remains central to the term.

Examples can be found across continents: the Māori in New Zealand, the Sami across northern Europe, and the First Nations, Inuit and Métis communities in Canada. Their struggles for land rights, cultural preservation and political representation have increasingly become part of global conversations, and so has the question of who gets to tell their stories.

Pakistan, however, occupies a more complicated space.

The state does not officially recognise “indigenous peoples” as a separate legal or constitutional category. Instead, communities that would fit international understandings of indigeneity are classified through administrative labels such as language, tribe, or ethnicity in official data systems like the national census.

For instance, Pakistan’s census framework records identity through categories such as “language spoken at home,” “tribe,” or “ethnic group,” rather than any designation of indigeneity. This means communities are documented as “Baloch,” “Pashtun,” “Sindhi,” or “Brahui” in linguistic or ethnic terms, rather than as indigenous peoples in the international sense.

As a result, communities with distinct historical and cultural identities are often absorbed into broader ethnic classifications rather than being recognised through a dedicated indigenous framework.

Yet Pakistan’s social fabric is woven from dozens of communities with distinct histories, languages and cultural traditions. From the Kalasha of Chitral and the Sheedi communities of Sindh and Balochistan to the Bakarwal, Jogi, Rebari and numerous communities living across the mountainous north and former tribal areas, the country’s diversity often extends far beyond the ethnic categories commonly used in official discourse.

The absence of a formal label, however, does not mean these communities do not exist. It simply means they are harder to count, harder to study and, in many cases, easier to overlook, including in the country’s newsrooms.

 

The reporters we don’t hear from

Ask journalists who regularly report on Pakistan’s indigenous communities to name women reporters from these communities, and many struggle to answer.

For Zuhaib Pirzada, who has extensively reported on Sindh’s indigenous groups, the absence is hard to ignore.

Sindh is home to numerous communities with distinct histories and traditions, the Jat camel herders, the Jogi, Lohar, Koli and Bhil communities among them. Yet when it comes to journalism, Pirzada says he can recall the names of men from these communities, but very few women.

“It is very rare in my own reporting experience,” he says.

The reasons, he believes, are neither simple nor limited to journalism. They begin much earlier, with barriers to education and mobility.

“If you look at the overall situation in Sindh, lakhs of children are already out of school,” he says. “And among those who do study, girls face even more barriers.”

Women from marginalised communities often navigate multiple layers of exclusion at once, poverty, caste, geography and gender. Journalism, a profession already difficult for women to enter in Pakistan, becomes even less accessible for women from indigenous communities.

“The space built for women is the space of the house,” Pirzada says. “The rest of the world belongs to men.”

The consequences of this absence extend beyond newsroom diversity.

For journalist Jamaima Afridi, who has reported on communities in northern Pakistan, the lack of local voices often shapes how stories are told.

“When someone comes from outside, they bring their own assumptions,” she says. “They think these are the problems or this is how things are.”

That distance, she argues, can flatten communities into stereotypes or reduce them to curiosities.

She recalls questions directed at people in Chitral that left her deeply uncomfortable.

“‘How do you get married here?’ ‘Do women run around freely here?’ These questions are so disrespectful,” she says.

The issue, Afridi says, is not that outsiders should never report on indigenous communities. The problem lies in how those stories are approached.

“It has a lot to do with intention and ethics,” she says.

But when there are too few indigenous women in newsrooms, there are also too few people who can challenge assumptions, provide context or question how a story is being framed.

And sometimes, the story itself is shaped by that absence.

Counting what isn’t counted

One of the challenges in understanding the representation of indigenous women in Pakistani journalism is that there is almost no data to begin with.

Media organisations rarely publish workforce breakdowns beyond broad gender categories, and even those figures are often unavailable. There is little publicly accessible information on the ethnic, linguistic or regional backgrounds of journalists working in mainstream Pakistani media.

As a result, measuring the presence of indigenous women in newsrooms becomes nearly impossible.

The absence of data reflects a larger blind spot. While conversations around diversity in media have increasingly focused on gender, they rarely examine how gender intersects with language, ethnicity, geography or class.

A newsroom may be able to say how many women it employs. It is far less likely to know how many of those women come from remote districts of Balochistan, from Kalasha communities in Chitral, from tribal areas, or from historically marginalised groups in Sindh.

The lack of numbers makes the issue difficult to quantify, but not impossible to observe.

Journalists who work closely with indigenous communities repeatedly pointed to the same pattern: they could name activists, artists, researchers and community leaders from these backgrounds, but struggled to identify women working in mainstream journalism.

The gap raises broader questions about who is included when media organisations talk about representation.

If diversity is measured only through gender, it can obscure the experiences of women who face multiple forms of exclusion simultaneously. A woman from an urban, educated and relatively privileged background may have a very different pathway into journalism than a woman from a remote indigenous community where access to education, mobility and professional networks is far more limited.

Without data, those differences remain largely invisible.

And when something is not measured, it is often easier to overlook.

The result is a paradox: despite growing conversations about diversity in media, there is still no clear picture of how many indigenous women are actually present in Pakistani newsrooms, or how many are missing from them.

The stories that remain unfinished

In many ways, the absence of indigenous women journalists in Pakistan is not a gap that can be easily filled with recruitment drives or diversity statements. It is something that sits much deeper, in the slow accumulation of decisions about who gets to enter certain spaces, and who is expected to stay outside them.

By the time a story from an indigenous community reaches a newsroom, it has already passed through layers of translation. It is filtered through language, geography, class and perspective. And somewhere in that journey, the possibility of another kind of storyteller, one who belongs to that world, has already been lost.

This does not mean that reporting on these communities is absent or necessarily inadequate. Journalists, among many others, continue to document, question and bring attention to communities that are often left at the margins of national conversation. But even their reporting, they acknowledge, is shaped by the limitations of access, representation and proximity.

What remains missing is not only people, but perspective.

A reporter who understands what it means to grow up in a language that rarely appears in print. A journalist who does not need to ask how a community works, because she already knows its rhythms. Someone who can enter a village not as an outsider interpreting it, but as someone whose own story is already intertwined with it.

Instead, indigenous communities are often seen through the lens of distance. They appear in the news in moments of crisis, or as cultural snapshots, or as stories to be explained. Rarely do they appear as active producers of the narratives being written about them.

And so the question becomes less about absence and more about consequence.

What does it mean for a country’s journalism when entire groups of people are consistently spoken about, but rarely heard from? What gets normalised when some voices are always positioned as narrators, and others as subjects?

These are not questions with easy answers. But they are questions that linger long after the story is published.

Because even as this piece comes to an end, the newsroom it began in continues elsewhere. Another pitch is being discussed. Another story is being assigned. Another community is being written about.

And somewhere in that process, the absence continues quietly, unnoticed, unmeasured, but deeply felt in the stories that never quite find the person meant to tell them.