Mama Qadeer’s journey did not begin as a political one. It began as a father’s nightmare. In 2009, when his son Jalil Reki Baloch was forcibly disappeared, Mama Qadeer was still an ordinary man a bank employee, a family man, far removed from activism or protest. But that single act of injustice altered the course of his life. What the state intended as silence became the spark for one of the longest and most principled human-rights struggles in Pakistan.
When I interviewed Mama Qadeer, he made it clear that his fight was not born out of ideology or ambition. “I was forced into this struggle,” he said, not with bitterness, but with clarity. The disappearance of his son shattered his private world, but it also opened his eyes to a brutal reality that thousands of Baloch families were living the same tragedy, unseen and unheard.
That realization became his first milestone: transforming personal grief into collective resistance.
He went on to co-found and lead the Voice for Baloch Missing Persons (VBMP), giving structure and voice to families who had been abandoned by courts, media, and institutions. For years, Mama Qadeer sat outside the Quetta Press Club, day after day, through heat, cold, threats, and exhaustion. This sit-in lasting over a decade became one of the longest continuous protests for enforced disappearances in the world.
Another defining milestone was the historic long march from Quetta to Islamabad in 2013 over 2,000 kilometres on foot. This was not a symbolic walk; it was a moral confrontation. With elderly parents, women, and children walking alongside him, Mama Qadeer forced the nation and the world to acknowledge what it had chosen to ignore.
It was during this march that many began calling him the ‘Gandhi of Balochistan’.
The title did not come from slogans or self-projection. It came from his unwavering commitment to non-violence, even when violence surrounded him. Like Gandhi, Mama Qadeer believed that moral force could expose the brutality of power. He rejected armed struggle, refused hatred, and insisted that truth itself was a weapon slow, painful, but enduring.
When I asked him why he never abandoned peaceful resistance despite provocations, his answer was telling,‘If I choose violence, I become what I am fighting’.
Mama Qadeer was struggling for Balochistan not as an abstract political entity, but as a land of people stripped of dignity, identity, and justice. He spoke of Balochistan as a place where mothers grow old waiting for sons, where fear is normalized, and where silence is enforced. His struggle was for the right to exist without disappearing, for the right of Baloch youth to dream without fear.
He worried deeply about the next generation. In our conversation, he said his greatest fear was not repression, but hopelessness among Baloch youth. His life itself became his message to them: that resistance does not always roar sometimes it sits quietly, day after day, refusing to move.
Mama Qadeer’s milestones were never marked by victories in courts or announcements from power corridors. They were marked by persistence:
- turning a father’s loss into a people’s movement
- sustaining peaceful protest for years without recognition
- mobilizing global attention without resources
- proving that moral courage can outlast brute force
Today, as we bid him farewell, we must understand why his legacy matters.
Mama Qadeer showed that Balochistan’s struggle is not only political it is human. He taught that justice delayed cannot be buried under silence, and that one ordinary man, armed only with truth and patience, can become a compass for thousands.
He may no longer walk beside us. But every step taken for the disappeared, every youth who refuses to surrender to despair, very voice raised against enforced silence carries Mama Qadeer forward. Rest in peace, Mama.
You were not just the Gandhi of Balochistan, you were its conscience
