DESPITE the many shortcomings of their alma mater, Karachi University graduates have been a proud bunch, having received a decent education and that too for next to nothing.

Many of us students and our teachers braved perils everyday in just going to campus to receive/impart education as our counterparts do around the world routinely in safety. The word ‘peril’ isn’t being used loosely.

One isn’t talking about the rickety ‘point’ buses which ‘flew’ us daily to the alma mater and back. In the years, I was reading economics at the Karachi University some half a dozen students were shot dead and dozens were injured in incidents involving student violence.

Given how intense the automatic gunfire often was, it’s a miracle there weren’t more, many more, victims. Even teachers were not spared and some were assaulted, though it wasn’t as if they were targeted indiscriminately.

Only those teachers were harassed and/or assaulted whose ideological leaning was to the left, something that was beyond forgiveness, reprieve as far as Zia and his surrogates in the Islami Jamiat-i-Talaba (IJT) were concerned.

This nexus between IJT and the Zia regime was so well-established that after a professor was beaten black and blue by the famed Thunder Squad of the right-wing student group, the military governor of Sindh, the chancellor, then dismissed him from service citing the most dubious of reasons.

In this repressive environment, the IJT seemed to gleefully act as the military ruler’s ‘B’ team. Its armed squads seemed to operate with impunity as long as they delivered on their part of the deal.

Gen Zia wanted ‘peace’ on the university campuses and looked the other way as his ideological allies used all manner of brutal tactics to suppress ‘progressive’ dissent at the institutions. Ask Senator Hasil Bizenjo who was shot in the foot while taking part in an anti-Zia protest.

If you look at the official patronage extended like a protective umbrella to the IJT not just on campus but throughout Karachi, it is surprising, a tribute to their tenacity, that anyone with a progressive bent of mind survived at all.

Against such a backdrop, who would be surprised if the university administration including the vice-chancellor tilted towards the IJT? It may be unfair to say that Dr Masum Ali Tirmizi, the VC in our days, was ideologically allied to the IJT.

Perhaps he was meek and found it easy to succumb to most of the IJT’s demands as the student wing of the Jamaat-i-Islami was aggressive and enjoyed the backing of the country’s military ruler who had recently overthrown and executed the elected prime minister.

The point is he may have often favoured the right in his decisions and earned the ire of all progressive forces in the university but at no point did anyone mistake him for ‘Saif Bhai’ (Saifuddin), the bespectacled and pimpled IJT nazim (boss) then.

This was a time, when the Zia regime, the Jamaat and its student wing ruled the roost. Following bloodletting between the Khalqi and Parchami wings of the governing (PDPA) People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, the Red Army had marched into Pakistan’s western neighbour.

Hard-line Reagan had replaced the relatively soft Carter in the White House. The United States and its western allies embraced Zia and all Islamist forces in the country. The West saw them as vital pawns on the chessboard, as it took on the Soviets through these proxies.

If the stranglehold of the right was loosened it was only for a day at a time as a handful of militant anti-Jamiat student activists offered no more than passing resistance. Despite killing two IJT activists on campus, they couldn’t dent the IJT’s near-permanent might and muscle.

But even through this period, and yes I belabour the point, no matter how much he was castigated by the ‘progressives’, the vice-chancellor managed to more or less keep the dignity of his office intact.

The recent bizarre decision of the University of Karachi to award an honorary doctorate to the minister of interior Rehman Malik for his services towards ‘peace’ in Karachi has left me bewildered.

Mr Malik has been quoted in last Thursday’s Dawn as telling the cabinet he should be tasked with collecting the outstanding power bills as he had already succeeded in restoring peace to Karachi and Balochistan. Peace in Balochistan? Need one say more?

And isn’t it public knowledge whatever modicum of peace has been brought to the metropolis is due to the suo moto action taken by the Supreme Court of Pakistan? Isn’t it true the main hero of the piece is one Ijaz Chaudhry, a major-general? Yes he was the director-general of the Rangers removed from office earlier this summer by the apex court after Sarfaraz Shah’s extra-judicial killing by the Rangers’ personnel was captured on camera in Karachi.

His quiet return to office dramatically ended the spike in violence and the target killings in Karachi and he has been rewarded with a promotion to lieutenant-general. One eligible to command a corps would hardly feel the need for doctoral robes.

There can be no doubt Rehman Malik earned the gratitude of the MQM when the party was feeling vulnerable and uneasy in trying to figure out the meaning of Zulfikar Mirza’s outburst especially at a time when it wasn’t even clear whose tune the former Sindh minister may have been marching to.

Dr Pirzada Qasim, the current holder of the venerable office of the vice-chancellor, may have merely acquiesced in this award to a controversial sitting minister, making dubious claims about the restoration of peace.

But how will he defend himself if his critics charge him with having acted like an MQM sympathiser. And don’t ask me if I am still proud of being a KU graduate.

The writer is a former editor of Dawn.

abbas.nasir@hotmail.com