Rang de Basanti in Pakistan - Working Paper Esterni 04/08
←
→
Page content transcription
If your browser does not render page correctly, please read the page content below
WWW.SOCPOL.UNIMI.IT
Dipartimento di Studi Sociali e Politici
Università degli Studi di Milano
Working Paper Esterni 04/08
Rang de Basanti in Pakistan.
Elite Student Activism
in the 2007 State of Emergency
Marta Bolognani
WWW.SOCPOL.UNIMI.IT
Dipartimento di Studi Sociali e Politici
Facoltà di Scienze Politiche,
via Conservatorio 7 - 20122
Milano - Italy
Tel.: 02 503 21201
02 503 21220
Fax: 02 503 21240
E-mail: dssp@unimi.itRang de Basanti in Pakistan. Elite student activism
in the 2007 State of Emergency
Dr Marta Bolognani, Department of Social Sciences, LUMS, Lahore, Pakistan
Email: martabol@gmail.com
Website: http://ss.lums.edu.pk/faculty.html
This is work in progress. Please do not quote without the author’s permission
Abstract:
On 3rd November 2007 General Parvez Musharraf imposed a State of Emergency on
Pakistan. During the State of Emergency the judiciary was turned upside down, the
media selectively censored and many lawyers and human rights activists were arrested.
While the lower classes remained relatively silent and carried on with their daily
routines, an unprecedented movement against Musharraf, but more so pro-democracy
and pro-judiciary, swept the elite of the country.
This paper focuses on the participation of the students in this movement, and in
particular on the peculiar and surprising political awakening of the students at LUMS,
the elite management university in Lahore. The aim of the paper is to analyze the
interrelation between a specific class subculture, their political concerns, the
extraordinary means of communication available to them and the development of the
protest. I will analyze how the protest was organized and negotiated
with the university administration and the local police, refused a direct clash with the
establishment, was justified according to upper class parameters, and created acceptable
myths of national leadership.
A discourse analysis of the speeches by the university administration, the students and
the professors will be conducted in order to describe how the protest became aware of
itself. The data was collected through participant observation, monitoring of internet
blogs and videos and four interviews with prominent figures in the protest.
1Introduction
On 3rd November 2007, General Pervez Musharraf declared the State of Emergency in
Pakistan. The major actions taken by the Army during the period of suspension of the
constitution included the removal of the chief justice Iftikhar Choudhry (allegedly as
rumours had spread over the negative ruling of the Supreme Court about Musharraf’s
election as president while holding the position of Army chief), arrest of civil rights
activists and lawyers and censorship of both English and Urdu media. Despite rallies and
protests, the resistance to the State of Emergency was relatively bloodless and it pulled
together elements of the civil society that had not been seen collaborating before. This
resistance movement, the way it was organised, publicised globally and how it relied on
specific social networks, shows some peculiarities as a social movement. This paper aims
at analyzing how a elite private university in Lahore became one of the most talked about
elements of the movement and how the actors taking part in it were able to participate
and in some respect lead the movement thanks to their unique social and cultural capital.
Before starting, I would like to add as a disclaimer, that contrary to many cynical voices
that are suspicious of the motives behind the mobilisation of the upper classes, having
been myself a political activist when springing from a bourgeoisies family, I do not
necessarily criticize a priori the involvement of the rich. On the other hand, and given the
social texture of Pakistani society, I deem highly important to study the subject social
movement within all its class specificities. As a trained anthropologist, I am narrowing
the present analysis down to a socio-cultural one and I will leave the discussion about the
opportunity and efficacy of the student movement to political scientists.
Methodology
This paper being still work in progress, it is only based on 4 interviews with the main
figures of the student protest and several informal conversations with other participants
in the protest. Given the high involvement of ISI (one of the Pakistani secret agencies) in
2the Emergency, all the names of the individuals interviewed have been modified to
safeguard their safety. The future research schedule aims at interviewing other key
figures of the protest, together with students who have been at the margins or had to pull
out for personal reasons (i.e. family intervention). The material collected through
participant observation of virtual protests on campus (then posted on youtube.com or
sent to CNN) and of administration meetings over the involvement of students in the
protest are also substantial parts of this ethnographic piece of research. In addition, I
monitored the Facebook of Concerned Citizens of Pakistan and Student Action
Committee, the Emergency mailing list and the virtual publication the Emergency Times.
Being a faculty member of the same university did not act negatively on my access to the
protest movement. As it will be further down argued, in fact, it seems that unlike many
student movements, especially in Europe, Lumnites enjoyed a close, positive and
deferential relationship with the institution and therefore were mainly happy or at least
courteous when speaking about their experiences.
The Lawyers’ movement, Musharraf’s decline and the State of Emergency
Saskia Sassen, the renown sociologist and opinion maker, was visiting Pakistan when the
State of Emergency was declared. In her candid first-hand account published in nearly
real time by The Guardian, she juxtaposes her own experience of the Emergency in
Lahore to the few images of police repression broadcasted through the international
media. Sassen talks of ‘niche repression’ (Sassen 2007) and describes how quiet and
busy in the day to day routine the Lahore streets are like. She also mentions the few
arrests of which she had been aware through her personal contacts. What clearly dawns
on her is the lack of involvement of the masses:
the critical issue is: will the street rise? That is the concern on Pakistan's
president Pervez Musharraf right now. My experience of the street in Lahore
tells me the answer is no. In its day of greatest violence, Lahore turned out to
contain two separate worlds: that of violent repression and a larger, bustling,
diffuse world of daily life. A thousand is a lot of arrested lawyers, but it can
3drown in a city of 7 million, especially when the local media have been
closed.
Musharraf’s declaration of the State of Emergency has been described as the ultimate act
of a wounded bird. In 1998, when he secured power through an epic but bloodless coup
against Nawaz Sharif, he was opposed by protests from civil and human rights activist
that did not last too long. A former army general, Musharraf impressed many Western
governments and some of the Pakistani upper classes with his liberal vision. Portrayed
stroking Labradors in one of his early interviews, during his rule TV channels and media
groups flourished in a country where even democratically elected prime ministers had
been rumoured to have sent punishment squads to rough up journalists who had written
against them. After September 11th, Musharraf became one of the closest allies of the US
in fighting terrorism. His real contribution in the anti-terrorism struggle has been
questioned by many political observers and has been internationally exposed by Hamid
Karzai, the President of Afghanistan. One of the accusations moved against Musharraf is
not having been willing to crush extremism completely as its continuous threat is the
crucial factor pushing the US towards the unconditional support of a military dictator.
Not particularly hated a dictator, Musharraf nevertheless was never able to build popular
support. He escaped a few assassination attempts, but his real troubles, started with the
investigations about the missing persons of Pakistan carried out by the Judiciary.
Pakistan Human Rights’ records have always been appalling, according to Amnesty
International even under the rule of Benazir Bhutto who is now portrayed as the
extinguished hope of a progressive Pakistan (Dalrymple 2007). In March 2007,
Musharraf deposed the Chief Justice Iftikhar Choudhry with charges (not followed by
official proceedings) of corruption. The lawyers opposed the dismissal of the Chief
Justice with street protests, strikes and rallies. Eventually, the Chief Justice was re-
instated. Roundabout the same time, a group of men and women gravitating around Lal
Masjid (Red Mosque) in Islamabad started blackmailing the government threatening to
burn shops and carry out suicide blasts if their vision of Sharia was not adopted at a
national level. Deaf to requests coming from prestigious religious Saudi bodies of toning
the form and content of their demands down and ignored by the government for a long
4time, the tension escalated to such an extent that in July the mosque was raided and the
civilians, including women and children, killed. This gruesome event, closely monitored
by increasingly critical and independent media appalled public opinion and started off a
series of suicide attacks especially against government and military targets that is still
continuing.
Overall, the involvement of the masses in the anti-Emergency movement has been
negligible, although once the Emergency was lifted and both PML-N (headed by Nawaz
Sharif) and PPP (headed by Benazir Bhutto) started the rallies for the elections
postponed from December to January (and eventually after the Bhutto’s assassination to
February), popular gatherings started reappearing on the streets. The reasons for the lack
of involvement of the working classes in the anti-emergency movement have been
identified with a general feeling of resignation about recurrent martial law in the country,
the fact that social justice issues (such as the raise of the flour prices) would have much
more appeal to them and the assumption that many people in the country still do not
regard democracy as the best system of governance.
Some students involved in the movement commented in this way:
I don’t know why the masses did not come out. The concept of emergency
instils fear. People would say ‘we would get beaten up, this is the way
governments are’. There is fact there is no leadership in Pakistan that can
run a street movement. (…)You could say that it is not really judges that
connect people…they are not the ones who have made their life better. You
have to recognize that. Constitution was maligned by everyone. Musharraf
had more power than the others because he has a lesser system of checks
and balances, but the others did that too. My perception would be that
everyone agreed upon the injustice of Musharraf’s government. But I cannot
make the claim.(H)
More evidently, personalities from the art and the music scene expressed their views
against the Emergency: the singer of the famous rock band Junoon wrote an open letter
to Musharraf’s son explaining his change of mind about his father’s politics and Ali
Zafar, the leading pop singer, wrote a song referring to the unfolding events.
5The Lums context
The Lahore University of Management Studies, probably the most prestigious University
in Pakistan, was founded in the early 1980s by a group of enlightened entrepreneurs who
identified the lack of a leading group of managers as one of the biggest obstacles to the
growth of national industries. Thanks to private contributions, the university has now
grown to a 8,000 (?) strong institution. It has a Business School, a Computer Sciences
Department, a Social Sciences and Humanities Department, a Maths Department, an
Economics Department, has recently started the Law program and the next academic
year it will open the School of Sciences and Engineering. In spite of an increasingly
strong National Outreach Program (NOP) recruiting promising students through
bursaries across the disadvantaged national areas, the social composition of LUMS, as it
is widely recognized, is of upper-middle classes either from business or feudal
background. To give an idea of its class and cultural homogeneity, it may be of help to
know that when teaching theories of ethnicity at LUMS, I normally take the university
example as a paradox of endogamy and cultural capital that does not formally constitute
an ethnicity. Following the paradoxical example of Abner Cohen and his theorization of
the London City brokers as an ethnic group, I ask the students to debate whether
Lumnites (LUMS students) are an ethnic group. The students normally come out with a
list of characteristics that do make Lumnites an ethnic group, despite highlighting the
segmentary1 nature of such group. The majority of them use as a common denominator
the learning process adopted at LUMS, but also more practical and visually evident traits
such as language (slang) and dress code. They also mention the general cultivation of
human rights understanding as the basis of a distinctive culture that has its climax
whenever Lumintes meet students from other universities and allegedly invariably end
up saying to themselves ‘They can only think like that because they haven’t read Alavi2’
(see below about the interaction among different universities during the Emergency).
1
According to Evans-Pritchard a segmentary system is one that is based on even major
differences but is able to pull itself together under a common identity under external threat.
2
Alavi is a Marxist social scientist who has written extensively on class in Pakistan and is
always used by a few professors at LUMS.
6Although the level of cultural homogeneity is exaggerated by public perception and the
campus enjoys a wide array of ideological and religious niches, it is important to
highlight how the world outside LUMS perceives it and how, consequentially, the
Lumnites population constructs and projects its identity.
The universal medium on campus is English, and the students often speak English among
themselves or at least a mixture of Urdu and English or Punjabi and English. Students
come mainly from Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad, although the NOP recruitment has
made the ethnic component more varied.
The faculty body in LUMS is predominantly foreign educated and given the international
interest affecting Pakistan, the campus enjoys frequent visits or virtual lectures from a
number of academics famous worldwide (i.e. Saskia Sassen and recently Noam
Chomsky in video-conference). One of the most common comments I have come across
when talking with second-year students is that coming to LUMS have taught them how
to think independently and how to challenge their high school text books, especially the
ones used in Pakistani Studies, a discipline that covers a variety of subjects related to
Pakistan, but has been criticised by many as grossly biased propaganda tool (see for
example Saigol 2005). The approach to education is therefore clearly very different to
the one used in other Pakistani universities where critical thinking is not necessarily
encouraged. The organization of the campus and the administrative machine is openly
inspired by Harvard, where many of the faculty members have studied. This, however,
does not include all of Harvard principles, as for example, the constitution of the
Students Council affirms that such body is not allowed to carry out political activism.
Some of the students have explained to me that the reason behind that rule that seemed to
me a contradiction in terms, is actually motivated by the violent drift on campuses in
Karachi where especially in the early 1990s politics and violent confrontation ruled to
the expenses of academic education. In early 2007, when the administration decided with
no consultation to build the new business school on the only football pitch of the campus
and the students did not protest, my stupor was countered by the rational explanation by
a student who cared for the sacrifices her family made to send her and her sister to
7LUMS and the fear that politics would enter the campus and jeopardise the education for
which their family had invested so much.
Given such premises, the involvement in the anti-Emergency movement of LUMS
students came as a surprise to many. The roots of such a stand however seem to go back
to spring 2007, when thanks mainly to the activity of the Law Department, students
started discussing what was happening in the country:
There was a long build up following from march, CJ, we had teach-ins,
petitions for shooting in Karachi and we called a meeting with the
council.(900 signatures to condemn the act), it makes no difference in the
national climate, but it makes a difference in your own uni, it is a step to
step process. Summer in Pakistan was bad in terms of electricity shortage
and elite kids feel in terms of that. I was taking a course in Harvard, I was
talking with my parents, a lot of shortage especially in Karachi. Lal
Masjid (The Red Mosque) had quite an impact it appals people how a
group of people who had not fired a bullet or killed civilians were
massacred in hundreds if not thousands. It was betrayal from the part of
the state. I do not what the components were but you do not use violence
like that.(H)
The main character of this movement then appears to be its ad hoc formation, not a broad
political agenda, and especially not concerned with social justice:
I would say that a few kids are Marxist but they are the only ideological
basis within LUMS. Generally the concept of justice (…) and human rights,
is something taught and inbred into students. When you see something
fundamental crumpled upon, there is awakening. I don’t see a lot of kids
looking at social justice. They may work on that in the long term but they
only want to work for multinationals to think of issues beyond themselves
because the only reason to work for them is financial security, implies me
being commodities for me and wife, maybe being a Muslim spending 2.5%
on zikkat3. (H)
Although many of the Marxists present on campus were actively participating in the
protest, it must be highlighted that many of the students involved had done so for the first
time in their lives. As Gulzar, a Law student aged 21, put it:
3
Zikkat is one of the five pillar of Islam, and although quite tightly regulated by some
norms, can be translated with ‘charity’.
8I don’t know why the students finally engaged with this emergency, there
was more of a response than I had expected. One reason is that it was about
time we felt we were part of a larger nation, we made the others member of
the imagined community.(…) It could also been the class issue because we
are all more or less the same class here. One politician from PML-N said for
the first time the rich have come out to defend the law that is the shield of
the poor. The people I work with, I is true, they are idealistic. (G)
When in November 2007 many students got together in something called Student Action
Committee it then came to many of LUMS faculty members and people outside as a
surprise. As Gulzar said, the fact that the students got involved in something political
was a great achievement per se:
And the Student Committee constitution says explicitly that we cannot
engage in political activism. I think one of our biggest achievements is that
we managed to do political activism, in spite of the constitution of the
Student Council being the same.(G)
Schofield (1990) has argued that before 1960s and the rise of the charismatic figure of
Zulfikhar Ali Bhutto, politics in Pakistan was mainly an upper-class drawing rooms’
matter far away from the masses. Then came the popular support to the Pakistan People
Party (PPP), only to witness the political crack down of the dictatorship of Zia ul Haq in
the 1980s. With the death of the military dictator, the political scene started to become
much more varied, with ethnic violence on the streets of Karachi. In my opinion, the
anti-emergency movement, in many respect tied to the lawyers movement born in March
2007 in support of the Chief justice, shows a very new type of political organization and
social movement in Pakistan that may be an interesting case-study for other postcolonial
processes of democratization led by elites. In the conclusion I will compare the Lumnites
involvement in the anti-emergency movement with the fictional account of the rebellion
against the system of a group of Indian University student in the blockbuster Rang de
Basanti (2006). In particular I would like to analyse the interrelation of the following
aspects: the role of LUMS education in the students’ participation in the protest, the
means of protest (blogs, Facebook, international TV channels, a specific class subculture
9and the interaction between the university faculty and administration and the student
movement.
‘Where the gates of LUMS start, Pakistan ends’: Physical and Virtual Space in the
protest
Scholars in Sociology and in the filed of Social Movements studies are increasingly re-
analysing identity politics in relation to space. One of the pioneer pieces of work related
to this relatively new stream of interest is Batuman’s study of the Turkish bourgeoisie
political movement and the Ankara city development plan in 1970s. Batuman argues that
spatial appropriation and the appropriation of the image of public space are crucial
aspects of that political struggle (2003:262). His study is based on how the bourgeoisie
movement developed in a bourgeoisie area and was unable to cross its boundaries, but at
the same time was successful because of the advantages in playing within those familiar
and class friendly boundaries. The protest at LUMS more than thirty years later,
however, was able to use its bourgeoisie terrain in order to reach out globally. In a
negotiation process between the risks involved in crossing the LUMS gates and the limits
defined by the Vice Chancellor (temporal and spatial), Lumnites constructed their main
form of protest through an able use of the internet, exploiting not only personal
knowledge but also the one passed on by faculty members who were teaching courses on
the politics of non violence, political communication, etc and also professors who had
been involved in militant politics in the past and had some knowledge, for example, of
flash protests. This terrain with its protection from a sympathetic and strong headed VC
and its academic and informal resources passed on by faculty members was not available
to other university students.
As mentioned above, LUMS is seen by outsiders as a peculiarity within Pakistan and
there is a popular saying circulating in Lahore that goes ‘Where the gates of LUMS start,
Pakistan ends’. Paradoxically, according to Gulzar, this detachment from the masses was
one of the reasons for the awakening of the political conscience of the students:
10We are so out of tune with the rest and there was a tradition in this country
that when martial law comes in it will be accepted, but this rule does not
apply here because these people are so out of touch with the country.(…) It
is paradoxical that we protested against something that affects the Pakistani
community in a way.
(G)
Although some students participated in organized protests in front of the Lahore High
Court and then at the Lahore Press Club, in front of the police stations where activists
had been incarcerated or in front of houses where other were under house arrest and
subsequently even went for car rallies all the way to Islamabad, the major part of the
student involvement was witnessed within the LUMS gates. From Monday 5th November
for three weeks (till the quarter break) the students organized sit-ins and marches every
day during the lunch break (from 1 till 2, with a slight variation on Fridays for the Juma
prayer). All these activities, approved by the administration, were situated at the other
end of the LUMS gates, where dozens of police officers in anti-riot gear were stationing
often bullying the workers coming into the campus perhaps to send a message to the
students and faculty participating in the anti-Emergency movement. This rather awkward
institutionally friendly protest was the result of not too lengthy a debate, as critically
explained by Haroon, an Economics and Politics student:
Certianly I would not call (ours a) movement. Movements are on the
streets.(We have) never been on the streets. Never come to the point when
people gave self-sacrifice beyond time (…) (We followed the) parameters
that the VC put out. I used to look at what is practical in terms of making an
impact on those in power or getting people out on the streets. The debate
revolved around grasping media attention, showing there is resistance going
on. (…) Going for the media starts becoming cheap. Wandering a round
campus one hour a day is not a good strategy, you have to find a balance.
On the first Wednesday there were 900 people….it could have been a
movement it would have given courage to the people outside if we had gone
out, the students from the elite university. (Haroon)
The perception of the danger outside the gates of LUMS is a topic not everybody agrees
upon. Some faculty members, during one of the meetings held by the administration to
decide whether and how to support the student movement claimed that even within the
11LUMS campus we should have not assumed ‘sanctity of space’, as on the second day of
the Emergency declaration even the Human Rights Commission had been raided when a
group of citizens had reunited to discuss their position in relation to the new political
scenario. It was quite widely accepted that the numerous international links that LUMS
enjoyed abroad, such as the ones of alumnis or former colleagues of current faculty, were
putting the university in a symbolic position; people however disagreed on whether this
would work as a sort of protection or as a sort of target for the government in order to
send a very strong signal internationally about its seriousness about cracking down on
the opposition to the Emergency. One of the students responsible for the relations with
the media was more likely to describe the positioning and the forms of the LUMS protest
within a tactical strategy rather than as a cowardly move:
Our media work was good - the police was kept outside the gates and could
not get an idea of how many people were involved and who were the
leaders. We pretended that our numbers were still big. The newspapers were
very cooperative and made it easy for us to create this impression. I don’t
think they were objective.(Zainab)
Many of the students I talked with agreed that they felt a certain degree of impunity
would have helped them in case they had been arrested:
When you look at the extent of the missing persons….they do not recognize
that the LUMS students are in a much better position, we cannot be taken
away fro more than 4 days, that was my guarantee, I can assure people
unless there is some incriminating evidence, like conspiracy against the
State, or terrorist activity, but in terms of protesting, a lumnite protesting
would never have that problem but we couldn’t guarantee that to other
universities.(H)
According to the Emergency mailing list (date?) one LUMS alumni was arrested during
a vigil and was offered to leave the police station given his family connection, thus
backing some students’ perception of their relative impunity due to their social status.
However, the student refused to accept a special treatment. Whether baton charge and
prison were or were not an option, there were other threats which were more culturally
effective and surely affected many young students’ minds: rumours started spreading that
12students participating in the protest would be denied visas to study abroad. This was of
course enough for many parents to prohibit their children to participate in the protest.
Other were worried about not performing to their level best in the highly competitive
exams:
It is cultural it is the discourse that financial security is a priority. Financial
security only comes in because apparently it is that jobs are hard to come
by. It is true to LUMS only to a certain extent. It is true a parent questioning
what if your grade goes down and that company doesn’t hire you and you
get 5,000 less when you apply for a job?(H)
On the other hand, myths of sorts of rites of passage through protest and
encounter with the police were growing:
Especially among many of the boys there was this ‘we are not getting any of
the action’, ‘we are going to be sissy if we stay on campus for too long’ (Z)
I went to the high court protest, it was very scary but you know it was also
exciting.(G)
On the other hand, the elder in the form of the university administration and the
lawyers organizing the protests became an obstacle for the realization of many of
these confrontations:
Some students were dying to see what happened with other students that got
beaten up. Our administration has very good contacts with the government
administration, top commanders in the army…they were probably not
worried that Lums students were not able to trigger off a mass protest.(Z)
We saw the videos of the baton charge at FAST4.(…) the first day (Monday)
of the emergency many students had gone to the High court (the girls were
pushed inside the building, while the boys got a few blows). The lawyers
were grateful that the students had come but did not want them to suffer and
protected them, it was patriarchal protectiveness. The police had been
caught by surprise to see the students there and had not had instructions
about students so let themselves go. When the students came back some of
them were matter of fact, other people were very dramatic, ‘it was for real’,
4
Foundation for Advancement of Science and Technology
13‘the police man was huge, his hands huge’, as if it was a legionary battle.
‘He-man’ action figure kind of thing. (Z)
On the other hand, many kinds of threats were pulled against the students and the faculty
involved. One renowned faculty member was arrested on the second day of the Emergency
during a meeting at the Human Rights High Commission in Lahore, and released three
days after; another faculty member who is a Marxist activist was pushed into hiding after
news of his arrest had been leaked in the first week of the Emergency; at the end of
November 5 FIRs (first information report, equivalent to an arrest)were issued against 3
professors (one of which was not even in Pakistan) and 2 students (one of which had not
even participated in the protest) with charges of wall chalking, but the arrests were never
carried forward even when these individuals carried on their normal lives on campus. More
recently, the family of one of the students who had been interviewed by CNN and who is
from Karachi, was visited by some ISI agents who were allegedly investigating her links to
India.
Protest and Administration
We have already mentioned above that the university administration concurred into
prescribing or at least negotiating the forms that the protest should adopt. Faculty and
administration also met a few times over the first weeks of the Emergency in order to
discuss what role to take in the protest and especially if a formal strategy should be
adopted by the institution regarding the FIRs. A recurrent expression used in the emails
preceding and following these meetings was ‘the LUMS family’.
14I one of these meetings it was said that the university had negotiated with DHA5
authorities. The negotiation was based on the guarantee to the police that an eye was kept
on the students and their activities, but such ruling was carried forward through ‘our own
parameters’.
Although the university never took a political stand, some students were persuaded that
even at the top of the administration there was support for what they were doing:
Messing with the judiciary in this shameless way did not go down very well.
But the administration, we were grateful to them who had the conscience of
not acting like other universities and clamp down in a reactionary way with
the students, they gave us space but later on a couple of weeks later, it
dawned on me that it wasn’t as simple as that. Some people, (even at the top),
had their own views- at Lums we don’t have the most principled
administration, they do exactly what they feel regardless of the principle…so
if they did not want this to go on, they would have clamped down on us...
they would have not taken up that pressure if they had not their personal
interests involved.(…)When I spoke with (one of the top guys in
administration) he seemed to have such demeanour as if he knew something
that we did not know so I accepted not going out (Z).
Some faculty were acting like big leaders. By Friday of the first week,
faculty overstretched. We decided that we wouldn’t put down democracy,
but democratic process as some of us had an issue with democracy. Some
people were ready to accept a mixed system because democracy does not
exist in Pakistan until the feudal system is eradicated. Voltaire: one lion is
better than 100 rats. We had voted about this because we were saying that if
martial law, media and judiciary was restored, were the aims as Musharraf
going would not be itself guarantee of democracy.(…) I think that some
faculty was enforcing their agenda on us and they were very illiberal. Like
one girl told me, these days you are allowed to say that you do not believe in
God but not that you don’t believe in democracy.(Z)
Some members of faculty and administration were later on described by a minority of
students as PPP jihalas (translatable with ‘devotees’). Some students felt that there was a
subtle and sometimes not so subtle pressure from dome faculty members towards
5
Defence House Authority (DHA) is a body that incorporates relatively new residential
areas in the major cities of Pakistan.
15pushing the student movement to support the PPP. It is here important to highlight that
the people participating in the protest were not necessarily anti-Musharraf, but they were
protesting against a specific set of rulings that were considered unjust and unjustifiable:
I do not remember makinga conscious decisions but if you listen to my
CNN interview, I gather my state of mind of hwat I can remember now. The
sense that it was a blatant clear injustice…let me mention faculty here. (One
student) thought that if our faculty had not been involved we wouldn’t have
come out, but I don’t agree. Maybe admin wouldn’t, but not the students. It
was a clear wrong because what is the need of arresting social workers and
Imran Khan when Benazir is out? (Z)
Although many professors suggested as a source of guidance to the students to form a
democratic committee in which students and faculty would converse with each other, but
the latter would not interfere, later on in the Emergency weeks some students felt that
they were being pushed to meet Benazir Bhutto and to deliberate in a certain way:
Apparently now meeting with (a faculty member) has become a regular
feature of the movement as the culture is still patriarchal and the students
listen to the faculty.(Z)
Overall, although we cannot deny that some professors are indeed loyal PPP supporters,
most of the faculty seemed to be primarily concerned with more idealistic rather than
strictly politically pragmatic issues. Some of the questions discussed in the
administration meetings were how to produce academic courses relevant to the current
situation, and how to play the responsibility, explicit in the University mission, of
creating the nation leaders.
The notion of responsibility towards LUMS image and general intent was often
translated in preoccupation about the protest forms to be adopted by the students. In the
first meeting of faculty and administration after the declaration of Emergency, the Vice
chancellor said:
If they cross the norms, if somebody tries to be too brave, we will use our
own rules to punish them. We will maintain that decorum. Start cursing
people using foul language should not be encouraged in any space. They
16should show the example of the educated lot. We compare ourselves to
those nations who protest in a civilised way.
The kind of slogans we were using, is indicative of the kind of
movement(…).In Karachi the slogans were different. This shows how much
different cities are cut off from each other. Same slogans for different military
rules. They were using also (cheap) Bollywood or love songs and changed the
lyrics. There was an effort not to use ‘khutta, hae, hae’ (dog, shame, shame)
because of the connotations of dog. There was conscious effort to be as
civilised as possible because of our social background, we wanted to
differentiate from vulgar barbarians, street types. We increasingly discovered
when we went outside at SAC, things got very rude when Islamia College
Boys joined, it is a very awami (people, common man, bazari) college, as
opposed to the Lums elite. we also made an effort to streamline slogans, so
there were official and unofficial slogans. We should not even have specific
anti-Musharraf slogans because not everyone wanted to get rid of mush per
se.(…) (One of our instructors) says ‘burger bacchas’ (burger children), in
Karachi (as an opposite you would have) ‘maila’, ‘dirty’, those guys who are
street guys into dirty jokes and the girls want to avoid, and burger kids is the
burger culture, westernised kids, possibly disconnected with indigenous
trends and society.(…) The whole culture of this movement is also about
‘who do you wanna be?’.(Z)
According to some students, looking up to certain nations was not only translated in the
forms of the protest, but was the very reason why this political movement was able to
exercise such attraction of the previously politically apathetic Lumnites:
In my own opinion, I thought about this a lot, I think it is because this
movement did not reflect the politicization of the students, the importance
of civil rights or rule of law was necessarily growing in the students
organically to such an extent ...it is more of westernization. In general, the
most mobilized people would be Punjab University with the following of
Jamaat-e-Islami6. I think it was westernization as when was working in the
movement I saw how undemocratic the process was, like the political
parties, it is not an organic value, it is a colonial overlay. The women
suffrage was not organic in an Islamic society and we inherited as part of
the colonial experience. We never had a debate about women having a vote
or not, so it does not mean that women rights are respected here.(Z)
6
Jamaat-e-Islami is a strong politically militant and religiously informed party.
17Zainab described this approach by comparison to the Pakistani student movement
of 1970s and the political activism in other universities:
We were consciously trying not to copy student politics that had happened
in the past in Pakistan. Lahore had been at the height of politics in 1960s
and 1970s and many parents had been there. For a boy it would be ‘manly’,
our resistance is ‘burger king’ resistance, while they had been a macho
movement, even for females.
That street fight culture is not ours, the richest students go abroad or they
are too ignorant to get into LUMS and they do the gang stuff, like Pervez
Elahi7’s son in Lahore. The padda (fight) is much more tamed, in Karachi
we would have got the guns out. The police are not going to crack down on
you for no reason like they do in Karachi. Here people have too many
contacts. Everybody knows each other. (Z)
Relations with the rest of the movement
Above we have analysed the different subculture, educational and class background and
both the social and cultural capital informing the Lums student movement. We have
seen how some students looked up at the courage of students from other universities that
were charged and arrested by the police, and how the families of students from different
classes were reacting to their children involvement in a more relaxed way than the Lums’
ones:
Some people were involved only partially…one media person was not
giving interviews, and refused TV interviews. In PU their parents they are
used to politics (…) I always said that we had to learn from PU as they had
seen politics from a long time. Even the families they spring from. They are
very involved in the neighbourhood politics. Here we do not even know
who our neighbour is, in our bungalow. Here students are children of army
and government, but are still very sheltered. (Z)
7
Pervez Elahi was at the time the President of Punjab, a big player in the PLM-Q.
18Undeniably, as mentioned before when discussing the in/out dynamics of the space
management, going out into ‘the real’ world was one of the most changing experiences
brought about by the movement. Safina, one of the most visible Lumnite, described her
first encounter with Punjab University students as a ‘cultural shock’, referring in
particular to the scarce present of female students and the separation of the sexes in the
meetings. This sparked an interesting debate within LUMS students about the positioning
that they were taking. On one hand, they were clearly leading the Student Action
Committee:
We were the diallings of the media, the first the most surprising as in PU
things happen all the time, so she called us. We were always at the front of
the movement, not because of the numbers but because we started it. This
time PU got mobilised much later, the meetings at SAC could only get a few
people at rallies and meetings. Most of the people were from LUMS. The
student movement is interesting phenomenon as it revived after so long.
People outside Lums people do not believe we raised without an agent.
They were asking ‘who told them to dot hat’? it was not a widespread
movement in the country, why Lums was affected so much?’ (Z)
However, the students interviewed so far are quite critical about their own involvement if
compared to the one of other universities:
We had the luxury here of being more visible, but Islamabad did much
more, there were 1,000 students protest on the streets. People say it was
because of our initiative…but the others were taken to jail. If those who
inspired they do not show that they live up to the expectations, it will die
with time.(H)
Safina, however, was quite adamant that in the interaction other Lahori Universities were
picking up different social skills and inter-gender values thanks to Lums students:
She says they have learnt from us a lot, how to deal with women and respect
of women, they have learnt that you cannot be patronising and respect women
who do not wear certain clothes. She was under the impression that they were
bringing civilisation.(Z)
19However, her views and the ones of the Lumnites who called for a project of voluntary
tours of guest seminars about politics and the judiciary in other universities, were
contradicted by some other students who thought that it was the Lumnites who had more
to learn from Punjab University rather than vice-versa:
Diversity, there is a difference between a PU man and a LUMS girl… I think
the LUMS people need to learn from them how to conduct themselves with
others, there were issues there, because we talk a lot there is a lot of CP8
culture. You need to recognize that our administration does not let us go.(H)
PU had different concerns from us. The principle thing they wanted to
discuss was not judiciary, but how they would not allow the Islamic party to
join…’you don’t know what they are like’, their stories were fascinating.
Jamaat I islami after the mother party had invited Imran Khan to the
university, and the student wing, out of control, trapped him and called the
police, they carried on their shoulders, ducked, throw him in a van, locked
him in a room and then given to the police. PU got mobilised out of
embarrassment. Their concern was that, and they told us these things, and
they are so practical, they knew about these things, they understand the land
more than we do. They are individuals not linked to parties, no partisans,
they were also from the progressive student movement, the left wing
(Bhagat Singh cell). Safina said that we have to go to each university and
educate them about the importance of the judiciary and the importance of
mobilizing for the country. How can educate people who probably know
more than you? (Z)
At the same time, even Zainab admits that Lums was considered by the others as
a guide under many respects and makes a comparison with the cultural effects
that LUMS seems to have had on the social landscape of Lahore in other ways:
Afterwards the other students uploaded stuff as well. Fashion also spread
very quickly…everyone wants to be like Lums in Lahore. The level that
society looks up to this institution! They are perceived to be head and
shoulder above. And they also say where the gates of Lums begin, Pakistan
ends. When I came her 4 years ago you wouldn’t see many girls wearing
8
Closely following the American undergraduate system, at LUMS part of each and every
course assessment is Class Participation (CP). Students then compete at their best to discuss
the class topics in order to improve their marks, making lectures quite interactive but often
not necessarily relevant, as many students complain that marks are given for quantity and
not quality.
20jeans in Lahore, now a lot do, and I believe it is Lums influence.(…) If (the
other universities) are looking to us as the intellectuals to set the tone of the
protest, if it is peaceful, etc, they were constantly looking at us for the
agenda. It is often the high culture the intellectual avant-garde that drives
these movements. (Z)
Rang de Basanti in Pakistan?
In spring 2006, a cinematographic success swiped the Indian subcontinent and its
diaspora: Rang de Basanti. The film became the centre of such a debate that for months
Indian media would talk of the turn of the ‘Rang de Basanti generation’. The film was
the story of a group of relaxed and politically apathetic Delhi university students who
are accidentally recruited to act in a documentary on the violent resistance to the British
Raj by the granddaughter of a British soldier who served in India during the liberation
struggle. The subtitle of the film ‘A generation awakens’, describes the process of
change that they go through when they turn from disaffected Indian youth who are just
waiting to leave the country who they keep moaning about, into the vindicators of the
death of a military friend who is killed in a plane crash because of the dodgy quality of
the aircraft. Once discovered that the type of planes is faulty and is the consequence of a
corrupted deal made, they take a gun and shoot the responsible minister first and one of
their own fathers involved in the deal second, while in their minds the images of the
shootings they have acted in for the British woman run frantically. The students, each
one belonging to a different religion but united in the re-found loyalty to the mother
nation, eventually break into All India Radio offices to speak to the country and they are
killed one by one by the army. The film concludes with the reactions to the group actions
from many campuses across the countries.
According to Indian press, the ‘Rang de Basanti’ effect had a series of positive
consequences on the political conscience and hope of many ‘real’ young Indians. For
example, the trial for murder of a model of the son of an important Haryana minister was
finally brought to an end thanks to numerous protests against the privileged treatment
that had been reserved to him thus far. The film crew itself on the other hand directly
21went to the rescue of a group of ‘tribals’ who were being forcefully relocated in Gujarat
for the construction of a dam9.
A series of parallels can be easily drawn between the fictional account of Rang de
Basanti (which is one of the few Indian movies thoroughly appreciated by Lumnites) and
the Lums student movements, but the differences may be much more interesting, even
bearing in mind the natural different political contexts of India and Pakistan.
The first commonality is the inspiration that both in the film and among Lumnites has
come from the West; in RDB, the trigger for the students conscience is the British
documentary maker, while among Lumnites their political discourse was clearly inspired
by Western political philosophy (in the interviews, ‘social contract’, Voltaire, Weber are
constantly mentioned).
Class and national divisions have slightly different takes, though. In RDB there is a
conscious nationalistic and unifying discourse that group all the protagonists under the
idea of a very broad notion of justice. Lumnites have only partially tackled what justice
means to people who are not Lums educated and can relate to their knowledge of
Western political theory. Their appeals for the rule of law seem more intelligible to an
international audience than to their own conational.
The main difference, however, is the relationship of the relationship between the students
and the institutionalised power. In RDB the breach with the institutions is clearly
registered by the murder of the minister, and symbolically sealed with the assassination
of one’s own father. Lumnites have clearly shown a very deferential respect towards the
university administration and they have also articulated their belonging to the institution
through the use of the ‘family discourse’. Individually they also appear to have respected
the wishes of their parents in deciding how far they would contribute to the movement.
The question which is naturally posed about whether Lumnites have created a long term
RDB effect or not, is still quite elusive. The movement is much weaker but still alive. It
9
Aamir Khan, the actor playing the main character in Rang de basanti and one of the
biggest star in Bollywood had subsequently had his blockbuster Fanaa banned from Gujarat
in reprisal of his anti-dam protest.
22has opened itself up through the organization of the support to bomb blasts victims and
apparently notions of social justice are trickling in the debates.
It is possible that the movement changed the conscience that it will filter
through over time. Identities are constructed and reconstructed with time.
There is potential for something similar to social justice coming into the
students. (H)
The effectiveness of their actions on the end of the Emergency is also still debated. As an
anthropologist I would like to leave to political scientists to comment on the role played
by the Lumnites in the transition to a democratic Pakistan. In this paper I have simply
highlighted through my ethnographic tools how the subculture of this group have
motivated and informed their resistance. I will leave to the scholars of the Transition
Process (Gill 2000) to relate this to the potential of change in the national context.
However, I would like to conclude with the critical statement of two of the interviewees:
It never mattered to me how much coverage we got. I haven’t had time to see
if I would be proud…something as petty as this. It is not important; it was a
duty that I was compelled. When you are proud you are satisfied and you do
not strive for more. It is an honour to be mentioned as a university who is not
longer apathetic; it is good that it has been done. I do not think it helped with
the lifting of the emergency, it had 3 ends to meet: judiciary, media, …it was
when the protest died down that the media was clamped down. Yes we were
the first uni to do that and as a result more students came out, but if we
fulfilled that potential I am not sure. I don’t think it makes a difference to be
mentioned in the New York Times…it fits well with the idea that Pak is
unstable and needs intervention. (H)
The protest was about judiciary, missing people, the war on terrorism that
abused civil rights. I became more and more sympathetic towards the
government position the longer I spent in the movement. ‘Thank Goodness
for the zar who saved us from the people’. (Z)
References
Batuman, B. (2003) Imagination as appropriation: Student riots and the (Re)claiming of
Public Space, in Space and Culture, 6, 261
Cheema, A. (2007) Political Crisis on a Silent Street
http://www.ssrc.org/pakistancrisis/2008/01/02/political-crisis-on-a-silent-street/
23Dalrymple, W. (2007) Pakistan’s flawed and feudal princess, in The Guardian 30th
December, retrievable from
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2233334,00.html
Gill, G. (2000) The Dynamics of Democratization. Elites, Civil Society and the
Transition Process, New York: St. Martin’s Press
Saigol, R. (2005) ‘Enemies within and enemies without: the besieged self in Pakistani
textbooks’, in Futures, vol. 37, pp. 1005-1035
Schofield, V. (1990) Bhutto: Trial and Execution, Lahore: Classic
Sassen, S. (2007) Pakistan’s two worlds, in The Guardian, 7th November, retrievable
from
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/saskia_sassen/2007/11/pakistans_two_worlds.html,
accessed on 8th Feb 2008
24You can also read
