A STUDENT is expelled for bringing a rubab to the university hostel and playing it. A university in Lahore expels two students when they embrace each other after one of them proposed to the other publicly. Baloch students get harassed and picked up every so often from various universities across the country.

Policing what students wear, especially females, is common on many campuses. Women are told they cannot wear jeans or tights, etc. Some universities even have rules on how close men and women can come when they are talking to each other. Student unions continue to be illegal.

What are young people supposed to do? How are they supposed to get ready for life after university if we are not going to allow them to talk to each other, interact with each other, be responsible for what they wear (they are over 18 and adults by all definitions), and have confidence in themselves and their choices?

It is okay for these young people to get married and have children and to vote once they turn 18, but it is not okay for them to talk to the other gender or decide how much distance to keep from others or what to wear!

As soon as it comes to women’s dress, people ask: are you saying we should allow people to wear whatever they want? What if someone comes to university scantily clad or in very revealing clothes? But have we seen a lot of women walking around on Pakistani campuses dressed like this? Pakistan already has decency laws. They should apply to campuses as well. Why should there be separate laws for university campuses?

It is not about clothes, poetry or music. It is about policing. It is about the fact that we do not trust young people and we are afraid of young people. And by we, I mean we as a collective — especially the elites and people who have power and privilege. Of all constituencies, it is the young who have the potential to shake existing power structures. But that can only happen if the youth are organised, if they have spaces to reflect on what they stand for, what they want and how they wish to go about achieving it. The power holders are afraid of exactly this.

Our fear of young people and their potential makes us want to control them.

Pakistan is a young country. The 2017 population census showed that 40.31 per cent of our population was under 15 years of age, and another 19.19pc between 15 and 24 years. Almost 60pc of the population, therefore, was under 24 years of age. This country should be for young people; it should work to ensure that the youth, the future of this country, get every opportunity to develop. But our fear of young people and their potential makes us want to control them.

Dr Adil Najam and I were the lead authors of the 2017 UNDP National Human Development Report for Pakistan, which was on youth. As part of the data collection for the report, and among other things, we also did a nationally representative youth perception survey. Some of the facts that came up in the survey were very revealing.

For instance, 94pc of the surveyed youth said they had no access to a library, 93pc said they had no access to sports facilities, 97pc had never heard a live music concert, 97pc had never been to a cinema, 94pc had never been to watch a sports event, 60pc said they played sports infrequently, and 85pc said they had no access to the internet. I saw a report on a youth survey conducted recently by the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics and the numbers quoted there, in terms of youth having access to entertainment and other healthy activities, were very similar.

But the rhetoric in the country is that youth development is a national priority, as we want to benefit from the ‘dividend’ of this demographic goldmine — is, a high number of youth. We want them to get technical education so that they can be gainfully employed and can be exported as labour to other countries if possible. We want them to be computer literate so that we can increase our software and IT-based exports. We want them to be entrepreneurs and risk-takers so that they can be job creators rather than job seekers. But we are not willing to give them space for debate and discussion. We do not want to empower them, allow them the freedom to think and act, and we definitely do not want them to be ‘political’!

With the voting age at 18 years, we want them to vote but we do not want them to be political, or politically aware, and we definitely do not want them to take part in politics or question the political settlements/ arrangements in the country.

This is the crux of the problem. We cannot have the spirit of risk-taking and inquiry in entrepreneurship and/ or business and not in other areas. If the youth are going to be empowered to be the vanguard of business, entrepreneurship and the computer sciences, they have to have the same opportunities in other areas as well. They will have to have a say in the political, social and economic developments in the country. They will need to be in political parties, they will need to be in assemblies, they will need to be members of all sorts of governance fora.

To do all of the above, they will need to develop their confidence in their own abilities and thinking. We will need to create the space for young people to do that. If we are not willing to give them space, it is hard to expect that we will have a leadership in the future — in all walks of life — that is different to the disastrous one we have today.

The writer is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives, and an associate professor of economics at Lums.

Published in Dawn, June 7th, 2024