Mashal's death is a result of the regression of our student politics
Much has been said about what the lynching of Mashal Khan revealed about Pakistani society – from the brutal consequences of mob hysteria to the degree to which fanaticism has seeped into the social fabric.
That the tragedy took place in a university, however, spoke to another process that has helped bring the country to its current impasse – the political and ideological brutalisation of its students by the state.
The on-campus lynching of a student by a mob of his peers solely on the basis of his progressive ideas was chilling to all who witnessed it; yet it was also simply the logical culmination of a decades-old state project to neutralise the potential of student politics for resistance and dissent in Pakistan.
This project has largely been successful. Today, with the exception of a few campuses, the Pakistani university is not a space of freedom for learning, ideological debate or critical thinking, but one of apathy, ideological conformity, and moral conservatism, often enforced through a nexus between the state, university administrations and unelected right-wing student groups.
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The Pakistani university has become a space of institutionalised apathy, where students can be arrested with impunity for celebrating Sindhi culture; where they can be attacked by rightwing vigilantes for performing Pakhtun dance or for talking to a member of the opposite sex; where they can get killed for playing music; and where bright, progressive young men can be mercilessly lynched simply for imagining a less bigoted and unequal society.
An interrupted legacy
How did it come to this? Such poverty of political imagination among students was not always the norm. From the 1950s to the 1980s, Pakistani students were not a rag-tag mob but a collective, organised force to be reckoned with. They stood up to exclusionary education policies, organised strikes in support of organised labour and formed the core of the movement that brought down the dictatorship of Ayub Khan in 1969.
Campuses in the 60s and 70s were rife with healthy ideological contestation between Left and Right, with progressive groups like the Democratic Students Federation (DSF) and National Students Federation (NSF) often electorally ascendant over their right-wing counterparts.
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At the zenith of student politics in the 1970s, student power could be gauged from the presence of union representatives in all university decision-making bodies through legislation that mandated student consent for university policies.
Some student radicals even got elected to Parliament, like the NSF socialist Mairaj Muhammad Khan, who won on a PPP ticket from Karachi and became Labor Minister under Bhutto in 1971 (eventually resigning after 2 years once Bhutto began to renege on his socialist pledges).
Things changed drastically of course under Zia. As an autocrat opposed to the very idea of popular democratic participation itself, Zia saw student unions, dominated as they were by the Left, as a nuisance that required a permanent solution.
His regime began by arming right-wing groups like the Islami Jamiat Taleba (IJT) in 1979, which started conducting armed assaults on progressive student leaders in major universities, fueled by the anti-communist hysteria of the Afghan War.
When this failed to stop the progressive fightback, in 1984, soon after the country-wide electoral rout of the IJT by the student Left in union elections, student unions were permanently banned by the military regime.