It is only the second time that we are witnessing the rare sight of a political party completing its term in the Parliament and the democratic transition to a new elected government. This has kick-started the contest between those vying to rule the nation for the next five years. The general elections will be held in just over a month, tickets have been distributed, candidates have almost been chosen and the campaigns are formally underway.
The health of our democratic system can be assessed by analysing the problems and issues being discussed when we evaluate who should be our next representatives. What we see on the media and the political assemblies, however, is an unending story of corruption and dismissals, punctuated by hour-long analyses of irrelevant details of books that have not even been published. Amidst the comedies pertaining to patriarchs of major political parties, there is almost no conversation on the problems of common people. To be fair, this was the case with the last two elections as well. What is discussed on all mediums of communication is whose strategy would lead them to the echelons of power, whereas what should finally be our point of conversation now are the common people. The people for whom our procedural tradition of democracy has failed to deliver, the people whose lives are characterised by a frightening dearth of facilities as basic as water, education and health.
Perhaps the primary reason behind this gap between our lives as they are and as they are being projected is a dangerous assumption. When nearly all our political capital is being spent on the supposition that the upcoming elections will be an objective embodiment of the will of the people and will decide who is their true representative, our political actors tend to assume that people are a monolith identity and they refer to them as one, thereby ignoring all the complexities regarding ethnicity, race and class. They refuse to accept that the overarching category of people, or the nation, once deconstructed, would represent a union of sub-categories like factory workers, women, students and minorities. In order to represent them all, we must accept that they have all been wronged and, that too, in different ways. It is in our ill-founded emphasis that we are all the same, identical people that our conversations have been linear and, therefore, issues like workers’ minimum wage, lady health workers’ service structure, students’ life on campus, the genocide of the Hazara community, never make it to any political speech or even the national media.
This nature of politics has been excessively detrimental for such a particular group of citizens: the students. Once believed to the forerunners of nationwide movements, the students find themselves invisible in the whole discussion surrounding the elections. I have, in my previous articles, tried to talk about the emerging contradictions in our education sector. Students are being charged under terrorism laws and kept in prisons, women are being harassed on campus and imprisoned in their hostels, thousands of students have been fooled with fake degrees, hostel wardens have been acting as jailers, professors are being kicked out for teaching students to think critically, the Higher Education Commission’s budget has been reduced to half, and amidst all the crises, not a single political party has even accepted in their campaigns that this should be a priority. What is more problematic is that students are also kept from talking about their issues as a collective. Speaking as a student of a public-sector university, I find it surprising that there remains not even a single political avenue where students can express their collective take on our democratic transition of power.
I would also like to point out that students have not just been silenced, they have also been misrepresented. More than half of our country’s population is under 30 years of age and our political parties realise that ignoring this demographic is simply not an option. This is the reason why they have made attempts to become their representatives but only after fundamentally altering identities. Instead of speaking of specific issues pertaining to students, a vague category of ‘youth’ has been constructed. Following the logic of the state of Pakistan, they have attempted to make students believe that they should forgo their identity as students and strive for a higher category of youth so that their problems could easily be concealed. We must ask how can they even represent the youth without taking into account the place around which their lives fundamentally revolve: the campus.
One could argue that youth as a category is broader than a student and therefore can be more inclusive. I acknowledge this argument but what I must identify is that it fundamentally lacks content and evidence. Perhaps the real reason why the category of youth is being taken up at the cost of students is that no political party wants to talk about the structural inefficiency that robs 90 percent of the youth to even become a student. They boastfully claim that their leaders have been actively involved in politics since their student lives, but they would have no response when asked why they do not give the current generation the same opportunity.
Imran Khan, who leads the party most believe to be the sole representative of the youth, said in 2012 that Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) only needs Pakistan’s youth, not big politicians. It was in his party’s tenure that Mashal Khan was killed on campus and his party made no consequent attempts at decreasing extremism on campus. His party failed to build a major university and recent events have suggested that he has not even been loyal to the words he said in 2012. His party is actually using big politicians instead of youth: people who have a record of misogyny and harassment are joining his ranks and he has the audacity to claim that feminism has only been detrimental for our society. For a leader whose party failed to implement HEC’s sexual harassment policy in a single university in their province, and that too while women continue to be assaulted and harassed on campus, such a statement shows a dangerous lack of maturity, to say the least.
No political party, barring Pakistan People’s Party, has said a single word in favour of revoking the ban on students unions, yet all of them have student wings. These student wings have been at the forefront in their election campaigns and also when it comes to arranging rallies for them, raising their slogans, defending the private lives of their leaders while assaulting on the privacy of others, but these student wings have been absent where they matters: on the campus. Their leaders publicly pledged their loyalty to those who killed Mashal but they have never attempted at improving facilities on campus. Amid the presence of such student wings and other extremist organisations on campus, a student body who could truly represent students and personify the will of the students remains banned.
The upcoming elections put up a very interesting contradiction regarding students and the political arena. Every student who wishes to gain admission in a public-sector university needs to sign an affidavit to complete the admission process. The affidavit states that the university shall be liable to rusticate the students if they are found indulging in political activity ‘of any kind’. By this logic, students should not be allowed to vote in the upcoming elections because technically, using the ballot is a political activity.
But such contradictions do not bother any of our political actors. No wonder our youth is more interested in seeing who wins the FIFA World Cup rather than the elections.
The health of our democratic system can be assessed by analysing the problems and issues being discussed when we evaluate who should be our next representatives. What we see on the media and the political assemblies, however, is an unending story of corruption and dismissals, punctuated by hour-long analyses of irrelevant details of books that have not even been published. Amidst the comedies pertaining to patriarchs of major political parties, there is almost no conversation on the problems of common people. To be fair, this was the case with the last two elections as well. What is discussed on all mediums of communication is whose strategy would lead them to the echelons of power, whereas what should finally be our point of conversation now are the common people. The people for whom our procedural tradition of democracy has failed to deliver, the people whose lives are characterised by a frightening dearth of facilities as basic as water, education and health.
Perhaps the primary reason behind this gap between our lives as they are and as they are being projected is a dangerous assumption. When nearly all our political capital is being spent on the supposition that the upcoming elections will be an objective embodiment of the will of the people and will decide who is their true representative, our political actors tend to assume that people are a monolith identity and they refer to them as one, thereby ignoring all the complexities regarding ethnicity, race and class. They refuse to accept that the overarching category of people, or the nation, once deconstructed, would represent a union of sub-categories like factory workers, women, students and minorities. In order to represent them all, we must accept that they have all been wronged and, that too, in different ways. It is in our ill-founded emphasis that we are all the same, identical people that our conversations have been linear and, therefore, issues like workers’ minimum wage, lady health workers’ service structure, students’ life on campus, the genocide of the Hazara community, never make it to any political speech or even the national media.
No political party, barring Pakistan People's Party, has said a word in favour of revoking the ban on students unions, yet all of them have student wings
This nature of politics has been excessively detrimental for such a particular group of citizens: the students. Once believed to the forerunners of nationwide movements, the students find themselves invisible in the whole discussion surrounding the elections. I have, in my previous articles, tried to talk about the emerging contradictions in our education sector. Students are being charged under terrorism laws and kept in prisons, women are being harassed on campus and imprisoned in their hostels, thousands of students have been fooled with fake degrees, hostel wardens have been acting as jailers, professors are being kicked out for teaching students to think critically, the Higher Education Commission’s budget has been reduced to half, and amidst all the crises, not a single political party has even accepted in their campaigns that this should be a priority. What is more problematic is that students are also kept from talking about their issues as a collective. Speaking as a student of a public-sector university, I find it surprising that there remains not even a single political avenue where students can express their collective take on our democratic transition of power.
I would also like to point out that students have not just been silenced, they have also been misrepresented. More than half of our country’s population is under 30 years of age and our political parties realise that ignoring this demographic is simply not an option. This is the reason why they have made attempts to become their representatives but only after fundamentally altering identities. Instead of speaking of specific issues pertaining to students, a vague category of ‘youth’ has been constructed. Following the logic of the state of Pakistan, they have attempted to make students believe that they should forgo their identity as students and strive for a higher category of youth so that their problems could easily be concealed. We must ask how can they even represent the youth without taking into account the place around which their lives fundamentally revolve: the campus.
One could argue that youth as a category is broader than a student and therefore can be more inclusive. I acknowledge this argument but what I must identify is that it fundamentally lacks content and evidence. Perhaps the real reason why the category of youth is being taken up at the cost of students is that no political party wants to talk about the structural inefficiency that robs 90 percent of the youth to even become a student. They boastfully claim that their leaders have been actively involved in politics since their student lives, but they would have no response when asked why they do not give the current generation the same opportunity.
Imran Khan, who leads the party most believe to be the sole representative of the youth, said in 2012 that Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) only needs Pakistan’s youth, not big politicians. It was in his party’s tenure that Mashal Khan was killed on campus and his party made no consequent attempts at decreasing extremism on campus. His party failed to build a major university and recent events have suggested that he has not even been loyal to the words he said in 2012. His party is actually using big politicians instead of youth: people who have a record of misogyny and harassment are joining his ranks and he has the audacity to claim that feminism has only been detrimental for our society. For a leader whose party failed to implement HEC’s sexual harassment policy in a single university in their province, and that too while women continue to be assaulted and harassed on campus, such a statement shows a dangerous lack of maturity, to say the least.
No political party, barring Pakistan People’s Party, has said a single word in favour of revoking the ban on students unions, yet all of them have student wings. These student wings have been at the forefront in their election campaigns and also when it comes to arranging rallies for them, raising their slogans, defending the private lives of their leaders while assaulting on the privacy of others, but these student wings have been absent where they matters: on the campus. Their leaders publicly pledged their loyalty to those who killed Mashal but they have never attempted at improving facilities on campus. Amid the presence of such student wings and other extremist organisations on campus, a student body who could truly represent students and personify the will of the students remains banned.
The upcoming elections put up a very interesting contradiction regarding students and the political arena. Every student who wishes to gain admission in a public-sector university needs to sign an affidavit to complete the admission process. The affidavit states that the university shall be liable to rusticate the students if they are found indulging in political activity ‘of any kind’. By this logic, students should not be allowed to vote in the upcoming elections because technically, using the ballot is a political activity.
But such contradictions do not bother any of our political actors. No wonder our youth is more interested in seeing who wins the FIFA World Cup rather than the elections.