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# Banality of Evil
- URL: https://azadi.asia/en/banality-of-evil/
- Published: 2025-09-27T12:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-18T23:56:05.000Z
- Description: On the Baloch women’s sit-in in Islamabad, and the ordinary, bureaucratic indifference Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil.
- Author: ammara
- Tags: #lang-en, Balochistan, Islamabad, Baloch, State repression, Sit-in

Every day on my way to and from work, I passed the Baloch women’s sit-in. Mothers, sisters, daughters sitting on the hard paved concrete, with only the photographs of their missing loved ones. Every day, the world carried on at its usual pace: cars rushing past, office-goers preoccupied with deadlines, shops opening and closing their shutters. Life went on, uninterrupted. People shopped, went to lunches at upscale restaurants only 5 minutes from the square, completely blind to the agony and anguish in the faces of the aggrieved women. The protest was, to most in Islamabad, a mere inconvenience, an extra 10 minutes in traffic.

In *Eichmann in Jerusalem*, Hannah Arendt coins the phrase “banality of evil” to describe how ordinary people, acting without deep malice but through thoughtlessness and conformity, can participate in horrific acts, as seen in the bureaucratic processes of the Holocaust. She suggests that great evils can stem from a lack of thinking, an unwillingness to imagine the experience of others, or simply by following orders and engaging in mundane, routine tasks that dehumanize victims.

Evil is not always the face of a monster, a dictator or a devil. More often, it is banal, ordinary, bureaucratic, almost invisible. It thrives in indifference, in the quiet choice to keep moving, to not stop, to not ask. Passing by those women without a pause, without a word, without recognition — this is where the essence of evil lives. We imagine violence as sudden and spectacular, but it is also the normalization of suffering, the folding of someone else’s grief into the background noise of our routines. The real danger is not only those who pull the trigger or sign the orders for operations, it is the rest of us who carry on as if nothing is happening.

Their presence was a mirror which reflected our silence back at us, our empty politics and dreams of revolution that carry no risk. Their eyes haunting, asking questions, appealing to your humanity. Their vulnerability enough to pierce your heart if you would let it. To the hollow, morally bankrupt left, that in the name of practicality and tactics only served to strengthen the state’s oppression, that kept away in fear of losing jobs, grants or lives, or worse is criminally silent because their “position” is not aligned to the T. To the right wing ever so loud about honour and dignity, their hypocrisy laid bare as they avert their cowardly gaze from the Baloch mothers and daughters who sit on the streets demanding dignity. Where is your honour, you vile scum, where is your dignity? Do they not live up to your definitions of the “Perfect Victim”? Or not fulfill the criterion of your “politics of appeal”, the idea that oppressed people must continuously justify, format, and present their suffering in a way that conforms to the taste, norms, and comfort zones of the powerful. To the complacency and condescending indifference of the citizens of Islamabad.

There is a Balochistan-sized hole in the moral fabric of our society. And by choosing to ignore it, averting our eyes from discomfort and evading moments of a collective reckoning, we have only widened the rupture, making it harder, perhaps impossible, to mend.