HEAD half-covered with a fashionable magenta and black polka-dotted scarf matching her chiffon salwar kameez, Madeeha Sayed waited patiently with a group of friends at the Faisal auditorium in Punjab University, Lahore. Imran Khan, the legendary cricket player and the leader of the opposition Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf, was expected on the campus to lead a students rally against the imposition of emergency, and the girls were all set to be part of it. We want to convey to the government that we are not happy with what they are doing, and we hope that we will have the opportunity today, said the second-year clinical psychology student.
The judiciary has been paralysed, the media have been blocked, people have no rights. You cant speak your mind, you cant do what you want. We have to speak up now for the sake of the country. Somehow, as students, I feel we are a neutral group, not like politicians, and we have an important role to play, said the articulate Sayed.
Something strange is happening on the campuses in Pakistan. Four decades after the last students protests against Ayub Khan, and three decades after another military dictator, General Ziaul Haq, crushed students politics altogether by banning unions in universities, there are stirrings of resentment.
Since November 3, there have been small protests in several campuses across the country. Even more strange, they started not in one of the rough-and-tumble universities but at the elite Lahore University of Management Studies (LUMS), where students are said to be more bothered about the kind of salaries they will get when they graduate than with what is going in the country.
At LUMS, often described as the Harvard of Pakistan, the state of emergency has been a crash course in real life political science for the girls and boys, usually from privileged families, who study there.
Our faculty have always told us that we are studying theories, its the application that counts. We study about human rights and the Constitution and law, and now we are seeing how everything has been suspended, said one student. With the LUMS authorities wary of the media, the student said he did not want to give his name.
Protesters at LUMS have held hunger strikes and rallies within the neatly laid-out red-brick campus. They have also started a blog called pakistanmartiallaw.blogspot.com, which keeps students updated on emergency-related news from all parts of the country and about protests at other universities. A daily printout of the blog, called Emergency Times, is hot property on the LUMS campus. Please photocopy and distribute is its tag-line.
Being part of an elite institution does not mean that we close our eyes to whats happening around us and move on from here to our high-paying jobs. It is high time that we looked to the collective benefit of our country, beyond our narrow self-interests, said one of the students on hunger strike.
Rasul Baksh Rais, who teaches political science at LUMS, said the student protest dispelled the impression that the young generation was depoliticised. The students have been shocked by the enormity of the legal and political manoeuvring by President Musharraf to stay on in power. They are really concerned about how their country is seen in the outside world, what kind of label it is being given. It is they who have to live and deal with that label, which may not be very charitable. They want their country to be civilised, in the tradition of modern civilisations, tolerant, pluralistic, democratic, Rais said.
The other strange thing is that Imran, known for his dubious choices since he threw himself into political life and who is not yet considered a serious enough politician, is the main inspiration for the campus stirrings.
Imran, who escaped house arrest, was always a cult figure for his feats on the 22-yard-mat and for his Greek god looks. But he is now acquiring a cult status in Lahores educational institutions for his daring escape from house arrest and his passionate appeals from his hiding place to the countrys youth to rise up against the General.
He was, coincidentally, on the LUMS campus to speak at a seminar the day the state of emergency was declared. The news of Musharrafs decision came as the seminar was getting under way. Imran used the opportunity to send out a message to all students in Pakistan that they had to play ball. At LUMS, many students said Imran was the politician they admired the most. At Punjab University, Madeeha Sayed, the clinical psychology student, said the students needed a leader.
Imran Khan, she replied, unhesitatingly, when asked who that leader could be. Hes our hero.
Imrans dramatic capture at Punjab University on that day by students affiliated to the Islami-Jamiat-e-Taliba (IJT) the youth wing of the Jamat-e-Islami, an apparent political ally of his who then handed him over to the police massed at the gates, has only added to his stature among students.
Imran had announced he would emerge from hiding to lead a rally on the campus. But the IJT, which has a stranglehold on the university, declared it would not allow him to set foot inside Punjab University as there was no place for politicians in student life.
The IJT is not affected by the ban on students unions. Successive regimes have treated it as a religious organisation and used it to keep the lid on campus politics.
Jamat-i-Islami leader Qazi Hussain Ahmed and Imran are political partners. The IJT, however, seemed to be defying its parent organisation in order to protect its own turf. While non-IJT students waited for Imran to show up, the IJT took out its own rally on the campus against the emergency, shouting slogans against Musharraf and the United States. As it wound its way through the leafy campus, the former cricketer suddenly showed up, evading a posse of policemen around the campus. His supporters among the students ran to pick him up on their shoulders, but it was all too brief.
The activists of the IJT, who were more numerous and better organised, took him inside a building and locked him up there before handing him over to the police. Imrans capture led to two days of protests on the Punjab University campus by students opposed to the IJT.
For the first time, students who are opposed to the IJT but who have no other leadership felt emboldened to take on an organisation that has links within the establishment and is so powerful that it even decides appointments in the university administration. The IJT has aggressively pushed an Islamist agenda on the campus: it opposes music and intermingling of girls and boys, has laid down a dress code for women students, and is pushing for the hijab.
The awakening among students is not confined to universities. The demands for constitutionalism and the rule of law among Pakistans professional classes have caught the imagination of their school-going children as well. In Islamabad, a group of schoolboys and girls showed up at a busy intersection wearing black tape on their mouths to symbolise the gag orders on television channels.
Taken by surprise, the police baton-charged them. Another time, schoolchildren decided to walk in a procession to dismissed Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudharys house, carrying flowers for him, to express their solidarity with him and the other judges who did not take the oath under the Provisional Constitution Order (PCO). The police stopped them midway, promising to deliver the flowers to Chaudhary.
I am here to show my support for the judiciary of Pakistan. They have all been arrested just because they were going to give a judgment against General Musharraf. Everybody knows that he imposed the emergency only because of that, to save his own position, said Murad, an O-level student in a posh school in the capital. All of 14 years and dressed in his school uniform, clutching a rose that he wanted to give to Chaudhary, Murad wanted Musharraf to resign immediately. He compressed all his civics lessons into one line: Anything that goes against the Constitution offends us. Musharraf has violated the Constitution.
Nirupama Subramanian
