The students’ march: historical view

A spectre is haunting Pakistan’s ruling classes – the spectre of a return, a suppressed history which gains special valence due to our particular historical and structural burden. This is the spectre of student insurgency, which haunts Pakistan today. Its social antecedents are briefly recapitulated below.

Any hegemonic order produces its own intellectuals. Very schematically, these intellectuals may be divided into two groups. First, are the organic intellectuals which provide a dominant group with a sense of its own mission, ensure its cohesion, and elaborate on the group’s overall social and economic project. These may include the economic planners, ideologues, and everyday political organisers who act to unite a dominant group that acts and thinks ‘for itself’.

Second, once a dominant group is entrenched, it also facilitates institutions which ensure ideological and technical reproduction of the social order as a whole. These are the traditional intellectuals, which may include bureaucrats, state enterprise managers, public school and university teachers, media personnel, religious clerics etc. These harmonise the ruling bloc with the overall population. Due to their ‘critical’ distance from the ruling bloc, traditional intellectuals project an aura of ‘neutrality’ and thus function to reproduce the material and social order as a whole.

The colonial and subsequently post-colonial state historically acts as a bridgehead for an extraverted economy – one which is geared towards ‘advanced’ capitalist societies, producing dis-articulated and uneven development. For example, Pakistan’s economy is dependent on a handful of primary commodities and low value-added exports, along with exports of manual labour and military services. In such a disarticulated social structure, with its weak basis of social absorption for popular classes, the role of traditional intellectuals associated with state and civil society institutions (such as media, universities, religious institutions etc) takes an outsized role. They ensure the continuity of the economic order, while also reproducing wider social hegemony of incumbent ruling groups.

Universities of course are the institution par excellence for production of traditional intellectuals. From Lord Macaulay’s (in)famous minutes on education to the many manipulations of our national curricula, the production of traditional intellectuals has been a key problem for ruling classes. It is within this historical and structural context, that the education sector in post-colonial societies like Pakistan has been a major source of both anxiety and succour for dominant groups. It is also this particular context which has placed students in a strategic position for transmitting and expressing various crises of the ruling bloc.

In fact, it would not be amiss to state that almost every major shift in the social structure in Pakistan has involved student mobilisation in a central capacity. Thus, where the first country-wide martial lof 1958 is usually seen as pre-empting pending elections under the new constitution, it is often forgotten that the wider context was of a developing labour and students’ insurgency which aggravated fears of a government with social-democratic and anti-imperialist leanings. The Jugtu Front government in East Bengal, the banning of the Communist Party and Democratic Students’ Federation in 1954, student mobilisations against the imperialist Suez Canal War, and massive strikes by workers in multinational oil companies: all these events triggered fear among the dominant oligarchy and factored into imposition of martial law.

In the Ayub era, the two major waves of workers’ protests were also preceded by student mobilisations. Thus, the 1963-64 mobilisation of workers, especially in Karachi, was preceded by student mobilisations in 1961-62. The immediate context for these student mobilisations were the anti-Muslim Jabalpur riots in India and the CIA-sponsored assassination of the revolutionary Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. The new student activists which emerged in this wave of student mobilisation forged key worker-student alliances in the 1963-64 labour mobilisations.

The widespread popular insurgency against the ruling classes between 1968 and 1972 was also triggered by students. When General Ayub Khan set upon celebrating ten years of his marital rule as a “Decade of Development” in 1968, it was students who responded by marking it as a “Decade of Decadence”. The student and labour heroes of 1963-64 subsequently became the nucleus of the epochal movement of the 1968-1972 period, the most serious challenge Pakistan’s ruling classes have faced to date.

In fact, while the popular insurgency faced decisive blows from 1972 onwards, the long arc of 1968 carried over to the early 1980s. Labour was beaten into submission by the double blow of Bhutto-Zia. Pakhtun, Baloch, and Sindhi nationalist insurgencies were suppressed via the Afghan war, political victimisation, and military operations. In this context, the 1984 ban on student unions marked the end of an epoch. Thus, even as the Zia-regime rode through its most serious challenge (the MRD movement of 1983), it was 1984 and the banning of student unions that was the final gasp of the long insurgency that began in 1968.

The brief interlude of the Lawyers Movement might also be taken as an example. The latter’s limitations stemmed precisely due to its limited penetration in the popular sectors. While the Student Action Committee of 2007 played a heroic role, the depth and intensity of labour and student involvement was distinctly lower than the previous rounds of insurgency.

The point of this brief recounting is this: due to the positioning of universities in our state-society structure, weak bases of the ruling hegemony and their crisis often face their first stress-tests in the ambit of traditional intellectuals. Wider social crises transmit themselves quickly through spaces which are prime producers of traditional intellectuals and play a crucial role in overall reproduction of the hegemonic order ie universities. Thus, it is no surprise that campuses become key sites of struggle and that student politics has played such an outsized role in Pakistan’s history.

Today as well, students and the youth stand as the most visible markers of the prevailing crisis of the ruling bloc. From mobilisations against harassment and militarisation in campuses in Balochistan, the students from Fata leading the Pashtun awakening, the outbursts against cultural and social disenfranchisement among Sindhi students, to the crisis of student housing in Islamabad: the restlessness of youth is heralding a multi-level and organic crisis of the ruling classes.

The ideological justifications of the ruling bloc – built on religious narrowness and militarism – no longer provide coherence to wider social requirements. The economic structure, and its perennial incapacity, cannot absorb the burgeoning mass of the young. Students in Pakistan now join labour in the latter’s enforced subalternity of the preceding decades – ie one of precarity, serialisation, and invisibilisation (in the peripheries, even literal ‘disappearance’).

Small, but growing, country-wide student marches have been held for the last several years. These have recently been followed by mobilisations over issues of gender discrimination and ecological crisis. On November 29, students all over Pakistan and its administered areas will again march for the restoration of student unions and for restoring their long-severed linkages with labour and workers.

A long arc of history and crises is converging to the present. A rumble of discontent in the sphere of traditional intellectuals threatens to take shape. The spectre of a long-forgotten name is invoked again: the Student’s Action Committee. Beneath the republic of opulence and oppression, the murmurs of a history long-repressed are bubbling.

But the ruling classes do not forget: their counter-revolutions precede our revolutions. And Pakistan’s ruling classes remember what others are forced to forget: that students have never risen alone in this country. Much rides upon the young shoulders of our Arooj Aurangzebs and Sanaullah Amans. In this great federation of sadness, their unity is our great federation of hope.

The writer is a doctoral student, with research

interests in political economy and sociology.