The government’s response to this action by Minhaj University is interesting. Mr Nizamuddin, chairperson of the Punjab Higher Education Department, said that the university had infringed upon the students’ right to protest. The chairperson is undoubtedly correct, but someone should ask him where such sentiments when more than 200 students were being charged under the Anti-Terrorism laws in a public sector university, when female students of University Engineering and Technology Taxila were being imprisoned in their hostels, when students of Bahauddin Zakariya University, Imperial College and Preston University were protesting because the government, and this department, in particular had failed them. Someone needs to ask the chairman whether his belief in students’ rights is only activated when he gets an opportunity for political pandering.
In some respects, campuses hold greater meaning for students than their homes. This is because students spend the most productive parts of their day on campus. The time and energy students invest within these spaces shapes their personalities, dreams and aspirations. It is on campus that one sees the origins of new political and social trends. Beyond the empty cyclic routine of examinations, assignments and mostly artificial research, a life centred on human interactions thrives.
Only nine out of 15 public universities have campus accommodation in Islamabad, whereas private institutions have none
If we were to analyse the complex relationship of a student with campus life, the life of a boarder, or what we now refer to as a hostelite, would represent its epitome. In campuses across Pakistan, a hostelite’s life is governed by the campus, both directly and indirectly. The campus is their ticket to the new city and unlike a day scholar, their places of accommodation are also mostly governed by the rules and regulations of campuses. Their lives are mostly a rotation of the classroom and a 4x8 cell, punctuated by rare evasions of curfew times.
Simply put, a hostelite has no life other than the campus life.
This relationship of permanence, however, has had practical implications in Pakistan that are terrifying, to say the very least. Before moving on with the analysis of this darker side of a life away from home, let me acknowledge the argument about how hostel life provides newer experiences, everlasting friendships, interactions with people from different communities and an animated four-year life that remains with people as long as they live. I recognise this based on my own experience, but only if it is acknowledged as an argument predicated upon privilege: of having the means (financial or otherwise) necessary to enjoy hostel life without the pressures of the future. Moreover, in recent times, hostel administrations and the government have made sure that hostels remain as centres which resemble prisons more than pit stops on the road to success as they are advertised. We must, therefore, never neglect the thousands of poor students who, due to various pressures never get the chance to remember hostel life as a meaningful time of their lives.
The fundamental contradiction of hostels in Pakistan is the same as that of education itself: it is not enough. Public universities have generally failed to accommodate students, who mostly come from provinces where universities either don not exist at all or exist in an unusable state. Only nine out of 15 public universities have campus accommodation in Islamabad, whereas private institutions have none. In places where accommodation is given, the quality is compromised. Students from universities like Arid Agriculture University and Peshawar University have repeatedly complained about this oversight, revealing that even five to seven students are kept in 10x10 rooms at times. But nobody seems to talk much about this since it is our government’s trademark in every department, be it health, employment, or energy.
This means that the majority of students have to opt for private hostels that offer limited security and poor services in exchange for high charges. They make money out of the government’s inefficiency and the students’ helplessness. Simply put, it is a marriage of convenience for these private dorms, and for the students, a contract based on constraint and vulnerability.
For most public institutions that offer accommodation, hostel life is characterised more by an obsession to discipline as opposed to an effort to make life easier. In these institutions, a hostel is an additional apparatus whose job is to take the disciplining process to its logical conclusion. This is depicted when, at various institutions, students face strict curfew hours, when they are not provided internet in order to curb the use of what the administrators term as immoral websites promoted by a western agenda; when they are not allowed to wear shalwar kameez at annual functions, when they are called terrorists and subjected to racial profiling, when their parents are harassed and called from far off places for petty cases of discipline, and when, most importantly, wardens and superintendents behave as if they’re vicegerents of God.
When we imagine hostel life, it is something that we naturally imagine as a collective experience. Ironically, most of the administration’s energy is wasted in making sure that students don’t get a chance to organise.
For example, a few months back, at a major public sector university’s hostel near Anarkali, the quality of food went so low that the students started to eat from the market. Yet their mess bills doubled and they were being charged with facilities that were not there, and when they protested the situation, the superintendent kicked a few of them out of the hostel at 2am on a cold December night, and remarked, “Aiteraaz gunaah hay! (Dissent is a sin)”. The man who replaced him a couple of months later physically assaulted a student who questioned the curfew time, and banned the students from wearing shalwar kameez at functions, which, as per his wisdom, was an uncivilized dress not worthy to be worn at important occasions. What can such an attitude be termed but the effluvium of an insecure and colonised mind?
The situation gets scarier when we analyse this issue in the context of the most oppressed community in our country and beyond: women. It has not been long since news echoed from UET Taxila that women were banned from staying out of hostels after 3pm. The alarming fact about this is that UET Taxila has not been the only campus that has been unkind to women. The International Islamic University officially prohibited women in hostels to share beds and directed them to keep a distance of at least two feet when they slept. In 2007, cell phones were banned across women universities and the university administration started to use this law to harass and intimidate girls by taking away their phones. The curfew timings at institutions like Kinnaird College are strict and, if by chance, a girl fails to come back on time, she is left to the mercy of the streets and not allowed entry back to the hostel. This problem has even gone to such a ridiculous extent that some women students have reported that ‘rishta aunties’ (matchmakers) are allowed into the hostels, with the help of the management, to pick out what they refer to as ‘fresh fruit.’
What characterises the system that governs our women hostels across the country is a traditional paranoia that sees women as objects that must be contained to maintain moral order. It refuses to acknowledge that women have their own agency and is adamant on the fact that women need policing 24 hours-a-day. It is a system that fails to implement the HEC’s guidelines on sexual harassment in a single university across the country, but takes pride in the fact that it literally imprisons women to satisfy its obsolete, and irrational code of ethics.
All this converges on one simple fact that must be recognised before it is too late: students are not slaves!