Go Jamiat Go

Punjab University is one of the largest and oldest public universities in Pakistan. With 13 faculties and thousands of students currently enrolled, it is the focal point of higher education in Punjab, if not the entire country. It has an impressive past, having produced three Nobel Laureates and numerous scholars of high repute. That is why one is compelled to find out what is going on in those 1800 acres full of young students under the current circumstances, when a significant percentage of the society’s population is getting itself actively involved in the political bustle.

Nowadays, when the male students are not busy in keeping their gazes low when female students pass by and the female students are not busy keeping their dupattas in the right place, they are protesting. They are protesting against the bizarrely despotic hold of Jamat-e-Islami’s student wing, the Islami Jamiat Taliba (IJT) which is popularly known as Jamiat. The IJT’s clutch over the university is despotic because it has been able to successfully implement its own rules regarding everything that goes on in the university. It has created a severe conduct for students and even for the teachers, vigilantes for correcting ‘inappropriate dressing’ roam around the corridors, its shady dealings with the police and low-tier administration are common news around the campus and if even a classroom discussion dares to defy the activities of IJT, the teacher has to face the consequences. This is only what I hear from the students.

All this is bizarre because the IJT is not a representative body of the students. Five thousand students marching through the university against the IJT is proof. It has been imposed upon the university not by the students from below, but from above with the blessings and mercy of a long gone but not forgotten dictator. However, two decades, four democratic (?) national elections, and another dictator later, why has the plague lingered on in PU? Is it because of the cheerless de-politicization of the youth or had they really accepted this unfriendly environment for themselves for so long? Is this milieu a defecation of the military-mullah alliance or is the Jamaat-e-Islami really that influential in Punjab?

One thing is now obvious; student politics are, but a manifestation of national politics, and vice-versa. The importance of politicizing the public universities, thus, cannot be stressed enough. We saw a period of relative political apathy among people during the Benazir and Nawaz Sharif governments, which was obviously a gift from the preceding years. The Musharraf years have been duller than ever and the apathy has passed on. The IJT remained all along, unquestioned and unharmed.

It wasn’t until the lawyers' movement and the succeeding events that a very large portion of society, including students, became responsive to the traditionally despotic actions of Musharraf. It was this political awareness, seasoned by Imran Khan’s effective plot that led the students of Punjab University to come all out against the Jamiat. The students have announced loud and clear that they no longer want the Jamiat over their head. Thousands upon thousands have come out demonstrating, vehemently so, and with no other intention than to wipe out IJT from Punjab University.

These historical moments in the history of Punjab University are reflective not only of the present popular demand for change, but also provides a coaching lesson for all future political activities. It is a trailer of things to come. It is a warmer and a message to all in the now boiling political sphere that the future politics in Pakistan will now have to take to the streets. It will have to involve the people. It will have to take the shape of a movement. No longer will the politics of deals and understandings be imposed on the people without a Mall Road or an M.A. Jinnah Road being clogged up by protestors.

Just like it is one thing to keep an educational institution decent and ethically administered and entirely another to wrongly impose a reactionary body on thousands of students, getting on your knees indefinitely to avoid bending over completely is just not a good position to take. However, students are not the masses. They can only complement change. No political party today has the capacity to mobilize anything near a huge percentage of the entire population, but it is not a revolution that we are talking about. The democratic movement entails a concentrated effort on part of the urban population to support a popular transformation of government and to demand their rights, ‘on the street’.