One Man, One Mission: How Asif Malik United the Hazaraywals

There is a peculiar cruelty in the way history sometimes treats its most devoted servants. Muhammad Asif Malik Awan Advocate known to his people as "Quaid-e-Hazara" , the Great Leader of Hazara dedicated twenty-one years of his life to a single dream: a separate province for the people of Hazara, carved from the indifference of a Pashtun-dominant political order. He founded a party, coined an identity, went on hunger strike, endured imprisonment of his comrades, and fought in the courts and in the streets. Then, on 18th July 2008, he left this world quietly, before the greatest chapter of the story he had written could be told. Two years later, the movement he built would face its most dramatic hour. And he would not be there to witness it. But his party would be. His ideology would be. And his name would be on every banner.

A Region Without a Voice                                                                       

To understand Malik Asif, you must first understand the wound he sought to heal. Hazara — a mountainous, fertile division stretching across Abbottabad, Mansehra, Haripur, Battagram, Kohistan and beyond  has always been ethnically and linguistically distinct from the Pashtun belt that dominates the North-West Frontier. The Hindko-speaking Hazaraywals, making up over half the population, found themselves perpetually governed by a provincial politics that did not speak their language literally or figuratively.The first stirring came in 1957, when regional lawyers Mufti Idrees and Abdul Khaliq raised the question of a separate province they called Kohistan. But the Ayub Khan era's One-Unit formula crushed those early embers. The flame was not entirely extinguished it merely waited for the right man to tend it. 

That man arrived three decades later in a courtroom in Abbottabad.

The Advocate Who Became a Movement

On 18th July 1987, a young advocate named Muhammad Asif Malik formally registered Hazara Qaumi Mahaz Pakistan (HQM) with the Pakistani authorities. He was neither a feudal lord nor a dynastic politician. He came from what observers later called "the class of commons" a people's man, trained in law, armed with conviction, and burning with the sense that his people deserved better than to be footnotes in someone else's province.

From the very beginning, Malik's approach was both ideological and practical. He did not merely demand a separate province as an abstract slogan. He mapped out its viability — its resources, its revenue potential, its administrative capacity. He wanted Hazaraywals to see that their dream was not fantasy but a blueprint waiting to be built.

But perhaps his most enduring intellectual contribution was coining the very word that would unite his people: Hazaraywal. In the 1980s, Malik introduced this term to describe anyone who belongs to Hazara transcending ethnic lines, caste divisions, and sectarian differences. Hindkowan or Pashtun, Gujjar or Syed, farmer or shopkeeper — if you were from Hazara, you were a Hazaraywal. It was a masterstroke of political identity-building, and it gave the movement a collective noun that the province demand had never had before.

Victories Carved from Struggle

The HQM under Asif Malik was not a party of press releases. It was a party of boots-on-ground battles, and the 1990s would test that resolve severely.

In 1990, HQM launched an organised movement for the establishment of a dedicated education board for Hazara a quiet but consequential victory for regional identity. In 1992, backed by HQM's groundwork, a resolution was presented in the Provincial Assembly for the creation of Hazara province. It did not pass, but the very fact that it reached the floor was itself a statement.

Then in 1997, the PML-N and ANP coalition government passed a resolution to rename the North-West Frontier Province —a direct affront to Hazaraywal identity. Under Asif Malik's leadership, HQM mobilised protests across the entire Hazara division so forcefully that the resolution never made it to the National Assembly floor. This was no small feat: stopping a two-party coalition government with parliamentary majorities from changing a provincial name through the sheer pressure of street politics required both organisational muscle and moral authority. Malik had both.

But it was 1999 that would etch his name permanently into the collective memory of Hazara. When the federal government decided to shut down the DHQ Hospital in Abbottabad  the principal hospital serving millions of Hazaraywals , Asif Malik did something extraordinary. He launched a hunger strike unto death. He did not eat. He did not drink. He was eventually admitted to hospital, his body failing, his will unbroken. In response, the state unleashed one of the largest mass arrests in Hazara's history: 200 veterans were imprisoned in Haripur jail, 13 leaders transferred to the distant DI Khan prison. Yet the movement held. By 2000, the DHQ Hospital was restored.

A man who starves himself for a hospital is not playing politics. He is making a covenant with his people.

Hazara University: Building the Future in Stone

In 2001, Asif Malik turned his energy toward education. The movement for a university in the Hazara region had long been a symbol of the state's neglect of the area. Under his leadership, the campaign reached its climax, and Hazara University was established in Mansehra a lasting, physical monument to what a determined people's movement can achieve. Every student who walks its corridors today does so, in some measure, because of the man who refused to accept that Hazara did not deserve its own institutions.

The Quiet Departure

By the mid-2000s, HQM continued its work  fielding candidates in elections, raising the province demand in courts and assemblies, never relenting. In the 2002 general elections, HQM contested seats across Hazara, including its founding chairman on the ballot for Abbottabad. The results were modest in votes but significant in presence: the party was building a base, not winning a war overnight.

Then, on 18th July 2008 — exactly twenty-one years to the day after he had registered his party — Muhammad Asif Malik Advocate passed away. The irony of that date is almost too heavy to be coincidental. He was gone. His ideology was not.

The party had lost its founder, but it had not lost its compass.

After the Founder: 2010 and the Fire He Lit

The story of Asif Malik cannot be told without its most painful chapter , one he did not live to see, yet had, in many ways, scripted decades in advance.

On 8th April 2010, the Parliament of Pakistan passed the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Among its many provisions was a single clause that detonated like a buried landmine across the Hazara division: the official renaming of the North-West Frontier Province to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. For Hazaraywals, this was not an administrative technicality. It was an erasure ,  a signal that their distinct identity, culture, and Hindko-speaking majority would now be constitutionally subordinated to a Pashtun nationalist identity they had never claimed as their own.

Abbottabad became the nerve centre of what followed. Wheel-jam and shutter-down strikes paralysed the entire Hazara division. The streets of Mansehra, Haripur, Battagram, and Kohistan filled with protesters. HQM now led after Malik's passing by his family and party colleagues  was at the forefront, alongside allied sub-nationalist parties and the emerging Tehreek Suba Hazara under Baba Haider Zaman. It was the broadest coalition of Hazaraywal political forces ever assembled, all converging on a single demand: give us our province.

Then came April 10th. The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Police opened fire on unarmed protesters in Abbottabad. Seven people were killed. Over a hundred were injured. The coalition government of the KP province, then led by the Awami National Party, was widely blamed for ordering the crackdown. The blood spilled that day did not silence the movement — it martyred it into permanence.

What made the 2010 uprising especially significant was its multi-party character. HQM, as the oldest institutional voice for Hazara province, was joined by Tehreek Suba Hazara, local nationalist movements, and civic groups who had never before marched under the same banner. The breadth of that coalition,  stitched together in grief and anger  was itself a vindication of what Asif Malik had tried to build: a pan-Hazaraywal identity that transcended party lines.

He had coined the word Hazaraywal in the 1980s. In 2010, millions demonstrated what it meant.

The Seed and the Tree

There is a temptation, when writing about leaders who die before their moment arrives, to portray them as tragic figures , men defeated by time. Asif Malik was not a tragic figure. He was a seed.

The institutions he created HQM, the concept of Hazaraywal identity, the organizational memory of sustained protest, the legal frameworks his advocacy built these were not defeated by his death. They were inherited by it. His brother Qazi M. Azhar Advocate carried forward the torch in the immediate years after 2008. The party's subsequent leadership under Qazi Muhammad Azhar continued fielding candidates across KPK and even Sindh, where a significant Hazaraywal diaspora lives, proving that the movement had outgrown any single personality.

In 2024, HQM was fielding its highest-ever number of candidates nationally. Thirty-seven years after a young advocate registered a small political party in Abbottabad on a July morning, his creation is still alive, still contesting, still demanding.

What One Man Can Do

Pakistan's political landscape is littered with movements that died with their founders. What makes Muhammad Asif Malik's legacy remarkable is precisely that his movement did not. The reason, perhaps, lies in the nature of what he built. He did not build a movement around himself. He built it around an identity. Hazaraywal was not synonymous with Asif Malik,  it was synonymous with every person who ever looked out at the mountains of this region and felt that they belonged here, that they deserved to be heard here, that their children deserved schools and hospitals and governance that recognised their faces.

When you build a movement around an identity rather than a personality, you make it structurally immortal. The person can die. The identity cannot.

This was Asif Malik's greatest political insight, and it is the reason we are still writing about him today.

The Dream, Deferred But Not Dead

The demand for Sooba Hazara,  a separate province — remains unmet as of this writing. Successive governments have made promises, formed commissions, and quietly shelved reports. The political arithmetic of Islamabad has never been friendly to sub-nationalist movements that challenge existing provincial boundaries. The movement's electoral showing has been modest; Asif Malik himself and Baba Haider Zaman both hailed from what Dawn described as "the class of commons," unable to compete with the financial machinery of electables.

But electoral results are not the only measure of a movement's truth. HQM remains on the ballot. The Hazara province demand remains in parliamentary debate. And every time a politician in Peshawar or Islamabad dismisses the Hazaraywals' distinct identity, there are people ready to remind them that a man once stood in the mountains with nothing but a legal brief, a party registration, and an unshakeable conviction and built something that has outlasted him by nearly two decades and counting.

One man. One mission. And a people who refused to forget either.