Daily Times

Let’s not–for a moment–hurl severe criticism and unfounded objections at the demands of students in the face of the 1993 ban on student unions. Let’s not so quickly disapprove of the idea of student politics in the country and think of what’s not going to happen as a result of the Student Solidarity March with our (common citizens) participating in it and supporting the restoration of student unions.

Let’s go hand in hand with them, participate in the March and think of and see what’s going to happen after our support, with the latter causes serving as a stream of light in the way of prolonged overwhelming darkness and a ray of hope when there has prevailed for long an air of despair on the authoritarian rule in Pakistan.

A video that has gone viral, a few days ago, has become the talk of the town. In it, various student activists overflowing with vigour and valour can be watched chanting anti-state slogans–and rightly so–for the suppression and violation of their due rights both in the educational institutions and athwart the country.

Held at the Faiz Festival, Lahore, the electrifying demonstration by students was intended as ‘awareness’ campaign ahead of the Student Solidarity March scheduled on 29 November 2019, for all the various student parties to bury the rancour to become united and ensure as much participation of students as possible, under the banner of Student Action Committee.

It is not for the first time the Student Solidarity March is being observed across Pakistan, but the fact is, it also took place across 16 cities or so, in 2018. However, there is no denying that this year the March has gained much momentum than it did never before. In October this year, in the wake of the harassment of students by the administration of Balochistan University, the protests against it flared up there.

One of the many demands of the protesting students was the revival of student unions. In a similar way, the student activists in Sindh and Punjab started holding demonstrations with various demands reverberating around the roads. The demonstration, as intended, has proved to be a mobilizer for the Student Solidarity March.

Student unions were banned in 1984 under the Marshal Law ordinances (MLOs) by the regime of Zia-ul-Haq. Since then, student politics lost its vitality despite the ban lifted in 1989. But the violence among different student unions themselves and with police, and caused by it the fear and disgust among parents to let their children join the state-owned universities and colleges made it necessary for the involvement of students in politics to be put to an end by the Supreme Court of Pakistan in 1993.

However, the educational and democratic cost that we have paid, still be paying as a result of the ban on student politics is the largest of all the reasons due to which it was imposed. In the status quo, students are faced with a multitude of quagmires ranging from the lack of basic facilities such as drinking water, infrastructure, convenient transportation and hostel accommodation to the abuse of students in the form of blackmailing, sexual harassment, abdication, and even to a greater extent, killing.

About half of the total population today is devoid of easy access to basic education and half of that who has access stays deprived of quality education. With corrupt officials on the seats leveraging the institutional budget for their personal mileage, universities and colleges have failed to bring advancement in the field of science and technology, to produce intellectual minds in the face of ‘rotten’ teaching methods and syllabus, and to measure up to the required skills for jobs for the terms innovation and productivity have been foreign to them.

Of the many educational problems the student face today, the most dismaying and disapproving is the harassment––which calls for urgent and imperative action––by the administration. Subjected to sexual harassment and blackmailing, hundreds of students every year are pressurized into killing themselves and without any transparent inquiry into the murder, are attached a tag of suicide.

In universities and colleges, students are restricted from dealing with the burden of studies in order for the resources being easily misused. The fact that students have been harassed, threatened, beaten, abducted, and even killed in the extreme case if they raise their voice against the injustice being inflicted on the common folks, has been overshadowed for so long.

Besides raising their concern for the violation of their educational rights, history is a witness that student politics has been the cornerstone of the protection of the democratic and constitutional rule in Pakistan. In March 1969, it was the student protest movements that resulted in the resignation of the then President, Mr. Ayub Khan.

So far as in the politics of Pakistan, there has been no such government that could have worked for the betterment of the social and economic conditions to which the working class is deliberately chained, and after a long period of the PMLN and PPP alternately governing the country, when we have tested Imran Khan as an incompetent person at the helm, we seem to have no other option than politics done by students coming from the lower and lower-middle classes.

The writer is a student of M.A English Literature at Shah Abdul University of Khairpur