BETWEEN 18 and 25 year of age, relieved of the toils of making a living, university students tend to be idealistic. They may have futuristic images of a good society or want to revive a ‘golden age’ that they think once existed.

They see politics as a way to their destination. Prompted by reports of violent encounters between students and security forces in Tehran, I have been thinking of student activism in Iran. The secret police (Savak) and its torture cells struck terror during Reza Shah’s rule and students, like other advocates of change, were mostly quiescent. When they did launch a protest, they were promptly suppressed. They participated in the movement that overthrew the Shah in February 1979. In November of that year a group of them occupied the American embassy in Tehran, and took 52 Americans hostage and detained them for more than a year.

Iranian students have been politically more vocal during the last twenty years or so. This development may be attributed to the relative mellowing of the Islamic revolution after Ayatollah Khomeini’s death and the election of certain liberal and ‘reformist’ individuals as president. Student activism has not significantly declined even after a reversal of the reformist trend with the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president. A brief account of a few student protest movements in recent years follows.

On July 8, 1999 a group of students at Tehran University organised a peaceful march to protest a press court’s closing down of a reformist newspaper called Salam. (Reform in this context denotes tolerance of dissidents, respect for human rights, and ‘real’ democracy.) The protest soon became louder than any witnessed since the revolution 20 years earlier. Salam was operated by an organisation of moderate clerics to which President Khatami also belonged. Demonstrators were supportive of his reformist agenda. The more militant clergy in government and parliament opposed it and they, not the president, controlled the judiciary, security forces, and intelligence agencies.

During the night between July 8 and 9, plainclothes militia and vigilantes, called Ansar-i-Hezbollah, (similar to the Islami Jamiat-i-Tulaba on our campuses) invaded student hostels, used batons and chains to beat up residents, threw some of them out of the windows, tossed out their books and personal belongings, broke down doors, and demolished walls. This event provoked further demonstrations and rioting which went on for almost a week. Many demonstrators were arrested and, according to some reports, 17 were killed and a larger number injured.

Student demonstrations spread to colleges and universities in 22 towns and cities, more notably Tabriz, Mashhad, Shiraz, and Isfahan. Seven years later (July 2006) some of those arrested during this protest movement were still in jail. One of them, Akbar Mohammadi, died in a hunger strike he had undertaken to protest the denial of medical attention to injuries he had suffered during torture in prison.

This protest had begun spontaneously. The protesters had been born and raised after the revolution. They were, thus, ‘children of the Islamic Republic’ albeit alienated. Most of them were not acquainted with Salam, the closure of which had triggered their protest.

They were denouncing political repression, violations of human rights, and denial of genuine democracy. They were defying the state and the stringent codes of personal behaviour it had imposed. They opposed its insistence on the wearing of beards and hijab, gender segregation, banning of vocal and instrumental music and dance; and its general disapproval of worldly desires. As these dissidents saw it, the clergy had outlawed all ‘fun and games’, things that brought joy, which had been a part of the Iranian culture for centuries.

They rejected the notion of ‘Vilayat-i-Faqih’ and would eliminate the office of the Supreme Spiritual Leader. They demanded the ouster of Ayatollah Khomeini whom they compared with Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator. They rejected forced Islamisation of politics and society. Reports have it that during this week the protesters, men and women, marched hand in hand, played music, sang, and danced — things the clergy forbade.

Another protest in November 2002 began at Tehran University and spread to universities in eight other cities. Students were denouncing the death sentence that a clerical court had awarded to a reformist history professor, Hashem Agajari who, in a public speech in Hamadan, had questioned the clergy’s exclusive authority to interpret Islam and the Quran. Not many of them were familiar with Agajari’s politics, and their protest was, once again, an expression of their frustration with the clergy’s rule.

A few months later (June 10, 2003) a protest movement began at Tehran University, spread to other universities in the city, and was joined by several thousand citizens the following day. Students were opposing the government’s plan to privatise some of the universities. They also raised the previous year’s anti-regime slogans mentioned above. They demanded release of political prisoners. But this time some of their associations also condemned President Khatami and demanded his resignation, because he had been untrue to his reformist pledges.

By June 14, the protest had spread to universities in Isfahan, Shiraz, Ahwaz, Hamadan,

Mashhad, Kirmanshah, and Tabriz. As it happened in previous such cases, Ansar-i-Hezbollah militants and the security forces beat up students.

An open letter to Khomeini signed by 250 intellectuals challenged the doctrine of supreme leadership and asserted the people’s right to criticise the government. By June 23 nearly 4,000 protesters had been arrested, some of them tortured to confess to their alleged crimes. Other students organised sit-ins outside the Tehran University campus and the parliament building. Families of prisoners maintained daily vigils outside the infamous Evin prison. Ayatollah Khomeini dismissed the protesters as American agents.

On Oct 8, some 500 students, many of them from the Amir Kabir University, gathered at the Tehran University campus and, joined by local students, protested against the policies being pursued by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. They objected to his government’s purging of liberal professors, suppression of academic freedom and the university’s autonomy. They condemned his address at Columbia University in New York a couple of weeks earlier in which he had said there was freedom in Iran. They said this was a ‘lie’ for which, as for his other ‘lies’, he should be held accountable. Pro-government students, the ‘Islamists’, shouted slogans in favour of Ahmadinejad and scuffled with his detractors.

The dissident students and teachers in Iran want a modernising, liberal, moderate and democratic society. This is not to say that the majority of students or the people at large are of the same mind. Ahmadinejad’s victory in the last presidential election shows that a substantial majority of the Iranian people does not object to the ruling clergy’s version of Islam and the controlled democracy they allow. The presence of dissidents and their courage to project their version of a good society does, however, suggest that the tide may turn one day and ‘enlightened moderation’ may surface.

The writer, a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, is currently a visiting professor at the Lahore School of Economics.
Ranwars@lahoreschool.edu.pk

IT doesn’t ever pay to be optimistic about the course of political events in Pakistan. The returning officers of Lahore who held Nawaz Sharif and Shahbaz Sharif ineligible to contest the forthcoming elections to the National Assembly have given the message that one cannot even be pessimistic enough.

Whether the two returning officers, both are judges, have handed down their decisions under the law or under extraneous pressure they have delivered a near-death blow to an already faltering electoral process. The question in the forefront is not whether the elections will be free and fair but whether at all be held. If held surely they wouldn’t be open to all.

If the disqualifications for election to the assemblies as recounted in the law — The Representation of the People Act — were to be invoked hardly any citizen would be qualified to contest. To be eligible, for example, a candidate must be known to practice “obligatory duties prescribed by Islam”. In addition he should be “sagacious, righteous and non-profligate and honest and ameen” and, further, that he “has not opposed the ideology of Pakistan” after its establishment.

No one is known ever to have been disqualified for not conforming to the virtues quoted above and a host of other conditions listed in the Act nor is there an agreed view of the ideology of Pakistan. Not many would qualify, for instance, if the returning officers were to examine whether the candidate is known to “violate Islamic injunctions” (ask the bootleggers of Islamabad who run out of stocks when the parliament is in session).

Disqualified ordinarily, but rarely, are convicted criminals and those who hold an office of profit in the service of Pakistan dismissed for misconduct or lack of a degree from a university or equivalent certificate from a seminary.

The Sharif brothers could have challenged their disqualification in appeal – Shahbaz with greater chances of success than Nawaz – but they do not recognise the high court judges, who must hear the appeal, as validly appointed. On the other hand if they remain disbarred the very purpose for which the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO) was promulgated stands defeated.

No conciliation could be considered national if the top leaders of a leading political party remain estranged. In fact as the events are shaping their disqualification may frustrate the conciliation effort altogether. If the Sharif brothers were to be permitted to contest, the Muslim League they lead very likely would have also felt persuaded to participate in the polls. Now as the discussions proceed even the PPP might join in the boycott.

The efforts at conciliation, ironically, thus might end up in aggravating hostility. The parliament without the PML-N participating in the polls would not be truly representative of public opinion. The PPP too boycotting would make it wholly unrepresentative. A government drawing a majority from the remainder splinter groups of these two mainstream parties and some religious groups would not last long.

If the aim, as the ordinance of Oct 5 contemplates, is “to foster mutual trust and confidence --- and remove the vestiges of political vendetta and victimisation to make the election process transparent…” then the approach has to be political and all embracing and not legalistic and biased.

It is no secret that Musharraf’s relationship both with Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto is marked by vendetta and victimisation. With the former it is also acutely personal. Who is to be blamed for it is a question not easy to settle nor should be debated when the search is for a solution that makes the elections representative and transparent. With Nawaz Sharif or Benazir, or both, kept out they wouldn’t be even credible.

The strife has reached a stage where not just the Baloch sardars even the national moderate leaders are talking of Balkanisation. It should startle no one when the country, as The Economist has put it, “is bitterly divided across religious, regional, ethnic and class lines” and Mr Musharraf has chosen “to pack the election commission and the caretaker administration with loyalists and rigged the rules”.

Alongside is the widely held belief that while Benazir Bhutto has been allowed to return under American pressure to ally with Musharraf, Nawaz Sharif has flown in a royal plane despite Musharraf’s plea to the Saudi King to hold him back till the elections are over. The growing restlessness at home and the world opinion on the wayward electoral process and the American and Saudi interference in it have robbed the polls of all authenticity even before they are held. Nobody at home or abroad expects the campaign and the ballot to be fair no matter how pious are the assurances held out by the government and by the election commission.

Mr Musharraf needs to get involved personally in the conciliatory effort intended “to foster mutual trust and confidence” for he stands at the centre of the mistrust and the public confidence too is lacking in the institutions that he has created. Despite his harangues on free elections, the general belief remains that he cannot let his opponents win for he must have two-thirds majority in the new parliament to legitimise all his actions during the emergency under the Provisional Constitution Order.

The key to fair and free elections thus lies not in boycotts or protests but in a broadbased national conciliation. The initiative for that again rests with President Musharraf in whose best interest it would be. The elections should mark the beginning of a peaceful democratic order and not intensify conflicts that might tempt the army to intervene once again.

ARE we going to have another PNA movement and with the same consequences — a plunge into the unknown? Did the mass agitations against Ayub and Bhutto achieve a purpose nobler than that of getting rid of an individual?

Ayub quit, but, instead of handing over power to Speaker Fazlullah Chaudhri as required by the 1962 constitution, he had his revenge on the politicians by inviting General Yahya to take over. In the other case, there is an obvious lesson for today’s ‘revolutionaries’. When the new ‘saviour’ takes over, those who lead the agitation reduce themselves to the level of petty sycophants. Ziaul Haq gathered the PNA around him only to murder Bhutto. This done, he threw the PNA into the wilderness and went on to rule as army chief and president for 11 years without a murmur.

Turkish President Abdullah Gul was here the other day. Did our politicians bother to fathom the reason behind the stunning success which Gul, Erdogan and his AKP represent? Together they undertook with wisdom and in low key the stupendous task of putting the army in its place. They succeeded because of their pragmatism: they halted where necessary, went ahead when the path was clear, compromised when persistence would have been fatal. Today, Turkey is closer to a military-free democracy.

Erdogan correctly judged what Necmettin Erbekan’s problem was: his leader had formed party after party only to be banned by the military. Erdogan and his neo-Young Turks threw Erbekan out and decided to work within the system. The army had been well entrenched in the political system since the founding of the republic and could not be taken head on.

A major test of his skills came in 2002 when he found he could not take part in the election because he had been convicted for writing a ‘seditious’ poem. He did not boycott the election, because he had the common sense to realise that even though he was not eligible for election, at least his party was. The AKP took part in the election, went on to form a government on its own, and Gul became prime minister. Within months, Erdogan’s disqualification had been set aside, and he became prime minister.

By the time his first term drew to a close, Erdogan had managed to chip away at the army’s power, and the military-controlled National Security Council had been reduced to an advisory status. In summer this year, he surrendered to the army by withdrawing Foreign Minister Gul’s nomination for presidency and, instead, advanced the election date. In the July election the AKP managed to increase its electoral support, and Gul was elected president.

Today, our politicians’ reservations about the transparency of the Jan 8 elections do not look unjustified, especially because the interim governments are not neutral. While one should not expect massive rigging, one cannot rule out the possibility of manipulated results in selective constituencies where the outcome depends upon a few thousand votes. In such a scenario, a boycott is tempting, but it shows frustration more than wisdom. What will a boycott followed by a nationwide agitation achieve? Besides, is the nation really in a mood for a PNA-like movement? And, if for argument’s sake, such a movement does take place, will its success bring democracy any closer? Musharraf is a reality and cannot be wished away.

You do not have to be Gul or Erdogan to improve the system from within. Mohammad Khan Junejo, may God bless him, nearly succeeded in his mission. The fact that Zia chose to sack a man who was branded his protégé testifies to his brilliant effort to erode the system from within.

LAHORIS can go to any length of imagination to establish the veracity of their story. They always happen to be in a strategic position when the most closely guarded secrets are about to be revealed.

Take the case of this gentleman who, true to his creed, was sandwiched between Mian Shahbaz Sharif and Mian Nawaz Sharif when the brothers journeyed through a rather strange route in the Punjab capital on their return from exile on Nov 25.

The story goes: “The Sharif caravan had reached Gawalmandi en route Data Sahib. The ambience was great. Thousands were in attendance and the entire area was illuminated in a befitting tribute to the city’s leaders. The aroma emanating from the eateries of the nearby Food Street whetted the appetite and had a special effect on those who had been denied all this for seven long years…”

As usually happens at such parties, the younger sibling found it impossible to resist the temptation, says the source, highly placed as he was on the vehicle that boasted the Sharifs. “Shahbaz asked Nawaz, ‘Bhaijan, kujh kha naan laiyye?’ (Brother, shan’t we have something to eat?) And when advised to delay that part of the homecoming till after a visit to the Data Darbar, he insisted, “Ok, we will eat later, but we can taste it now.”

The idea was obviously to pick up the thread from where the Sharifs had left it off. Incredible as it may sound, the story reinforces the conventional belief that the past-- real or perceived, which in a politician’s case is as good as being real -- is hard to shrug off.

The Sharifs are doing whatever occurs to their mind as right to prove that they are moderate if not who in local parlance would pass off as liberal. Nawaz Sharif has recently said it in so many words. “I am a moderate,” he announced, seeking to appeal to the locals who may set him apart from the liberals and to the foreigners who may take the statement to mean that he stands at a comfortable distance from the so called fundamentalists.

The former prime minister has called for the restoration of the judiciary as it existed on Nov 3 this year and he recognises that a vacuum exists. The Sharifs have even refused to confront the election commission. Instead, Nawaz goes to old foe Ms Benazir Bhutto to convince her to join him in a boycott of the polls.

Shahbaz has also been playing his part in this Sharif rehabilitation campaign. In fact he looked much more moderate than Mian Sahib when, after having been photographed with Hina Jillani at a London rally last month, he called on Asma Jahangir a few days ago and (reportedly) paid her a tribute on her struggle for rule of law in the country. He paid a similar compliment to Justice Jawad Khwaja (retired), the only judge of the Lahore High Court (LHC) who resigned to protest against the presidential reference filed against the Chief Justice of Pakistan, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry.

The Sharifs appear to have been doing all they can to earn the label of moderation, except for indulging in a bit of moderation that would indicate a real change. Moderation doesn’t in this particular case entail a severing of ties with the rabid right-wingers in whose company the Sharifs have spent just too many years to retain their independence. Moderation could have forced them to move beyond ceremonial visits to the residences of Aitzaz Ahsan and a couple of dissenting Supreme Court judges who are being detained in their homes in Lahore. It would have required them to actually be a part of the ongoing protest movement spearheaded by a group of civil society activists.

They have been trying to keep the judges’ issue in the limelight that many so-called prudent politicians would now want to be discreetly shoved under the carpet. Their search for keeping the movement for the restoration of the judiciary alive has taken them to various venues all over Lahore – venues that lie concealed before the supposed political leaders of the city, who are all for a free judiciary, but who happen to be moderates.

Nawaz Sharif tries to impress on the people the need and significance of a street demonstration that may lead them to prison. He goes to the house of Justice Chaudhry in Islamabad and is seen expressing his sentiments through flowers in the pictures taken at the residences of Justice Khwaja Sharif and Justice Khalilur Rehman Ramday in Lahore. But when a street opportunity presents itself at Justice Siddiqui’s, his politics tempers his political instinct and the eventual response is a muted one.

Pakistani politicians – moderate locally and by western standards – as it eventually turns out are extremely responsible and cautious people. Yet they are, along with all these analysts, in the business of promising people change. They are not prepared to waste their time in confronting the incumbent who, they say, has only a few more months in power. There is nothing for the president to fear from his opponents.