Daily Times

LAHORE: Speaking at the launch of a constitutional rights’ campaign on Friday, veteran activist Hina Jillani said that the campaign would mobilise the public to push political parties to incorporate guarantees in their manifestos about provision of fundamental rights as well as legislations on principles of policy laid out in the constitution.

“The campaign would not end with the election. We will pursue the parties once they are in power and if they fail to honour their commitments, we will take them to the court,” she said.

Jillani was speaking at the inauguration of Haqooq-e-Khalq Movement, a campaign initiated by the Peoples Solidarity Forum, the Progressive Students Collective and the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan to mainstream the concerns of marginalised segments in the upcoming general elections. Senior activist IA Rehman, poets Dr Khalid Javed Jan and Baba Najmi and a large number of students, academics and activists from across the city were also present.

Further, Jillani said after observing recent series of events in the country she was convinced that state institutions were not just oppressive in nature but they were also silly since they were unable to appreciate that young people with critical outlook towards society were the greatest strength of this country. “You are a cadre of people who’re saying that they want to change the state of affairs and the state is responding by harassing you and intimidating you,” she said.

She highlighted that so far only civil and political rights were considered fundamental rights, adding that social and economic were yet to be recognised as fundamental rights. “They were instead considered principles of policy contingent upon availability of resources. However, we all know that it actually isn’t about availability but instead about allocation of resources.”

She said that though education had been recognised as a fundamnental rights, there was still no right to healthcare in the country. “Sri Lanka is a developing country and it has universal healthcare. There are other cases of countries as well that aren’t much different than us in terms of resources but are still providing it as a right.” When the constitution was being formed, the idea was that citizens will decide how the state will function. Today, it is the other way around, she added.

Earlier, introducing the campaign, activist Zahid Ali said the state had failed in its responsibility to protect the fundamental and basic rights of citizens. The articles and clauses of the Constitution that safeguard and ensure the rights of the masses are never brought up at the time of election. While there is a lot of high politics and noise around the question of who is a traitor or how politicians are corrupt, the current political scenario is void of any meaningful debate that places the wellbeing of citizens at the centre.

Raza Gillani representing the Progressive Students Collective said Pakistan currently had the largest youth population in its history, yet the state viewed the young people of Pakistan as threats to peace. He deplored that the state did not have the capacity to provide the rights its own constitution protects. Enshrined in Article 23 is the right to free education for all; similarly, labour is one of the heavily legislated areas of the Constitution but these rights rarely feature in our political conversations. He said the paranoia and xenophobia, we as a society have internalised, because of the dominant narrative on terrorism spills onto students and workers, who come to our cities from other parts of the country, and are profiled based on race.

Alamgir Khan, president of Pashtun Council at the Punjab University, said it has always been observed that during elections, security agencies become active while people’s representatives are sidelined and silenced through intimidation. “We end up with representatives who sing to someone else’s tune,” he said. People from marginalised and oppressed communities who demand their rights under the Constitution are quickly labelled anti-state. Overall, there is no more space for dissent. As students, our demands have mainly been freedom of expression, speech and the right to study what we want to learn about, he said.

Speaking on issues faced by female students in public sector universities, Zahra Naqvi and Nida of Women’s Collective said every university is mandated, under HEC rules, to make committees to investigate harassment, but most universities do not have such platforms for students to take their cases to.

Nida said that when she had joined the PU, she looked at it as an opportunity to improve her life and become an independent woman. Yet sexual harassment is a reality of our campuses and it leaves so many female students despondent. “I used to think why was I even born if I have to face this all my life…Being a woman feels like a crime.”

Sharing her experience of the PU administration’s callousness, she said: “I was walking in the underpass at the PU and a man stopped his car and told me to get in. When I complained about it, I was told that I must have invited his attention or that I should have raised my voice there and then. When the same incident happened again and I yelled at another man who stopped his car and asked me to sit in, he complained to the admin. I was told that I belonged to an uncouth family and had no manners.” She stressed the need to take this matter seriously.

Raza Wazir of the PU and activist of the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement said student activists aren’t largely aware of their rights and are fearful of raising their voice or voicing dissent. There are many tea stalls in the city that carry the sign “no political conversations allowed”. That is the general environment of silencing that we face, he said, adding that when we speak about the abuses we have faced in Fata, we were shut down like we had said something sacrilegious or we were demanding something outrageous. “We were demanding everything a citizen of the country deserves – right to life, shelter, health and education,” he said. Students are made to sign a disclaimer when they join a university that they will not participate in any political activity, even though the right to assembly and freedom of expression are fundamental rights. The FIR registered against 169 or 196 students of the PU under terrorism laws is still hanging over them. This is the atmosphere of fear that students operate in this is what needs to be changed.

Speaking on the state of activism in Gilgit Baltistan, instructor Zaigham Khan said any dissent or voices raised for rights in Gilgit Baltistan have faced a stringent media blackout. It’s as if the space doesn’t even exist. “A few months ago, there was a movement around taxation and the slogan around it was no taxation without representation. From Skardu to GB, thousands of people were a part of it, but as always happens with such movements, it suffered a media blackout.” He said the government revoked the taxes after that but the people who were leading the movement were arrested on trumped up charges and their families were threatened.

Manzar Abbas of the Seraiki Council at PU congratulated the participants for launching a movement that hopes to represent the aspirations of the masses. The demand for a separate province in south Punjab comes from a need to improve the wellbeing of the poorest of poor in the remotest parts of this impoverished region of the province. “However, such a demand comes from the masses, not a handful of landlords and feudal lords who wake up to the plight of the poor a few weeks before the election.”

Rarely do our elected representatives consider smog, heat wave or lack of safe drinking water in cities priorities, said Mohsin of the Agrarian Collective. It is time for us to start a conversation around the issue of protecting the environment. Simply banning burning of crop waste once a year won’t fix the glaring problems we face, he added.

Ammar Ali Jan of the Peoples Solidarity Forum, whose teaching contract was recently arbitrarily terminated by the Punjab University, also spoke at the occasion. He said that when the will to build something new or emancipatory is termed anti-state by the powers of the day, it is akin to holding life itself hostage. “The shadow of fear overwhelms and unless there is an alternative that emerges from the situation, figures like Donald Trump and Narendera Modi emerge,” he said, adding that it was important for the youth to bring forward an alternative vision. The social contract between the people of Pakistan and the state is enshrined in the Constitution, he said. “Yet even those who raise their constitutional demands are considered anti-state.”

Published in Daily Times, May 19^th 2018.