LAHORE: The word ‘politics’ has such negative connotations attached to it that most people find it easy and fashionable to term themselves activists instead, said Alia Amirali, who is a lecturer at the Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad and was moderating a session on Youth Politics at the first day of the Afkare Taza Thinkfest at Alhamra on Saturday.

“How then, do you get students involved in politics?” she asked a panel of student leaders – Arooj Aurangzeb, who recently graduated from the Punjab University, Osama Ejaz of the Islami Jamiat Tulaba, Amna Fawad, a student of the PU representing the Women’s Collective, and Haider Butt, a student at the Government College University and a member of the Progressive Students Collective.

Stressing the need for doing away with the stigma surrounding politics and making a case for student unions, Haider pointed out that most of the prominent statesmen Pakistan produced were student leaders when they were young. “Students are vulnerable as it is...they should be able to have a say in administrative matters that affect them directly...this is why student unions should be revived,” he argued.

Sharing her own experience as a student, Arooj said the Punjab University had still not issued her degree because administrative hang-ups kept delaying the process. “If there was a student union at the PU, I would ask them for help because that’s what unions are meant to do,” she explained.

Amna drew attention to the problem of gender disparity in student politics. “Girls don’t go to protests or engage on public forums because they think the exposure could have negative ramifications for them,” she said, while stressing the need for greater involvement of young women in student politics. “Because girls face more problems on campuses than boys...harassment at the PU, for example, is so pervasive that girls take that as a given.”

Through platforms like the Women’s Collective, these girls have managed to create a network across campuses which they use to discuss the problems they face and work on how to solve them together.

Speaking about the ideological divide on campuses, Osama said there was no presence of left politics on campuses in Punjab. While there were a few left-leaning student groups in Karachi and Kashmir, campuses in Punjab were dominated by Islamist strands of ideology which the IJT represented, he claimed.

Published in Dawn, January 14th, 2018