The student movement

Students and lawyers have been at the forefront of the movement for democracy in Pakistan. The entry of students, some from elite rivate institutions, is perhaps a harbinger of things to come. Protests, hunger strikes and various forms of civil disobedience have ontinued in universities across Punjab, despite increasing government pressure to silence the students’ movement. Police have baton-charged rallies, arrested students and roughed-up faculty at the University of Punjab. Interestingly, the splintered student movement wasn’t just found on the campuses of public universities, the traditional source for student uprisings. This time around, it was private university students who led the charge. At the campus of the Lahore University of Management Sciences, or LUMS, a leading university in Pakistan, several hundred students protested, un-intimidated by police barricades and warnings against protests issued by plainsclothes officers. And about half the student population of Beacon House National University, a liberal arts institution in Lahore, rallied against Musharraf’s regime, demanding an end to martial law, arbitrary arrests of civil society activists and an end to curbs on press freedom. Some among these students, most of them belonging to the country’s generally apolitical upper-middle class and upper-class elite, even went on hunger- strike to demonstrate their anger.

What’s lent a soul to the student protests is its support from university heads and faculty across the country. Although somesuccumbed to pressure, a good number have born the punishment for their refusal to remain silent. Encouragement from university administrations to continue protesting the government’s actions is one reason why Pakistan’s educated but politicallyalienated youth are taking a stance against the government. At LUMS University the vice-chancellor and faculty members gave the students their blessings to register their protests on campus. “Terrorism is being supported in this country when the rights of its 160 million people have been suspended just because of one man’s greed for power and his fear of losing it,” said Dr Mumtaz Ahmed Saliq, a professor at Punjab University and head of its Academic Staff Association. At BNU the students were inspired to protest after one of their deans, Salima Hashmi, was among the arrested on the weekend the emergency was announced.

Hashmi, a known human rights activist and the daughter of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, one of Pakistan’s best loved poets, encouraged her students to throw in their support to the movement against martial law. The small but increasing vocal and demonstrative student movement follows in the footsteps of the aggressive and unrelenting lawyers’ movement that challenged General Musharraf’s unconstitutional methods of staying in power since he toppled the country’s top judge in March this year. Student activism is also a reaction to General Musharraf’s continued harassment and persecution of the country’s intelligentsia at a time when suicide bombers have flooded the country on mission. Instead of tackling that crisis Musharraf made every effort to silence the country’s media, its lawyers and it students, all of whom voiced critical views against the general’s leadership. A large number of professors, lawyers and human rights activists were jailed the day after General Musharraf announced an emergency. Some have been released since thenbut an unknown number remain under house arrest or in jail under detention orders. Students, too, reacted sharply to news thatsome of the country’s most articulate voices were being silenced by the use of force and torture.

“I am here because of Mrs Hashmi and because of what Pervez Musharraf is doing to our country,” said one of the organizers of a protest at BNU, a second year student at the university who did not want to be named. “Zia did it. So did Ayub. So did Yahya,” said thevisibly angry organiser as he rattled the list of Pakistan’s past dictators, men of uniform who have led Pakistan more often than thecountry’s democratically elected leaders, since the country attained independence from the British in 1947. At the BNU protest, students distributed copies of The Emergency Times, a four page circular documenting student protests elsewhere in the country, and encouraging other students to join in the protest against “martial law.”The anonymous group, which states that “it is a humble effort to inspire and make aware – for we together can make a difference in these troubled times,” is not affiliated to any political or social group and can be found online at : pakistanmartiallaw. blogspot.com “They will try to suppress us further, to intimidate us into timid obedience,” stated the publication’s editorial statement. “But we will not be ourselves silenced. In Complete Unity, we will lay bare the sins of the oppressors ; In Complete Unity, we will voice ourselves against them ; In Complete Unity, we will bring them down.” The movement is hardly massive but it’s the first serious effort by the country’s youth to question the manner in which the general ran roughshod over political processes.

“I didn’t know anything about politics or about what role we can play,” one student at BNU said. “But when I saw what was going on, I decided I had to find out how to play my part.” “A lot of students are depoliticised but I think what is happening in Pakistan today is an opportunity to politicise them,” said the movement’s organiser, whose parents were both political activists when he was younger, Moreover, he sees it as an opportunity to cut into the divide that separates Pakistan’s elite private college students and its middle-lass public school students. “This movement is just in its infancy,” said (Retd.) Brigadier Rao Abid Hamid of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, who also spent two nights in police custody after emergency was declared. “Educated Pakistani youngsters know very little about politics or their place in the political system. They’ve been kept at a distance for decades.” Indeed, manysignalled the nine-month long lawyers’ movement, the boldest and most sustained movement of its kind in Pakistan’s 60-year history as a sign of changing times. “Something has changed. There has been a very deep schism within the Pakistani elite,” said a human rights lawyer. “The civilian-military bureaucratic and professional elite – the people who are the dealmakers and the opinion makers are split. The lawyers’ movement and the students’ movement are showing that the elite compact that ran the state has collapsed.”