THERE is a moment in every young Pakistani’s life when the truth finally settles in that talent is not enough, that hard work is not enough, that merit, the very idea drilled into them since childhood, is a lie which collapses the minute it collides with power.

It happens to the students who top their class only to watch a well-connected candidate slide effortlessly into the position they earned. It happens to the graduate who studies late into the night for an exam, only to learn that the results were predetermined. It happens to the young professional who queues outside a passport office before sunrise because the only future they can imagine lies far away from the comfort of their home and the warm embrace of their family.

This is the quiet heartbreak of a country that has killed meritocracy with surgical precision and then wonders why its youth no longer has faith in the homeland.

For years, Pakistanis found comfort in thinking that even if governance was rotten and corruption widespread, two sanctuaries remained, elections and the judiciary. Elections, despite their flaws, still promised the possibility of a change of system every five years. The judiciary, despite its inconsistencies, still symbolised the last refuge where the citizen could hope for fairness. These institutions were far from perfect, but they offered the belief that the system, however battered, still had the capacity to correct itself.

But today, even these sanctuaries appear to have been vandalised beyond recognition. Elections have started to resemble choreographed rituals rather than genuine expressions of the public will. The judiciary has been deformed to resemble an extension of the executive rather than an independent organ of state. Institutions that were meant to protect the people now struggle to protect themselves.

All this begs the question: how long can this go on for and what happens to a society when its last avenues of redress collapse? History offers an answer that those in power rarely like to hear; when the state stops listening, the youth, that is the students, stop waiting.

Across continents and decades, whenever governments have suffocated dissent, manipulated elections, monopolised opportunity, or attempted to steal their youth’s future, it is the students who rise. Not out of whim or rebellion for rebellion’s sake, but because the consequences of silence would be far more dangerous than the cost of resistance.

How long can this go on for and what happens to a society when its last avenues of redress collapse?

In Greece, under the iron grip of the military junta, it wasn’t opposition leaders or generals who sparked the movement that toppled the dictatorship in the 1970s. It was students at the Athens Polytechnic who barricaded themselves inside, broadcast their defiance through a clandestine radio station, and demanded ‘bread, education, freedom’ as the junta sent a tank crashing through the university gates. That single act of brutality shattered the illusion of permanence the regime had carefully crafted. Within months, the regime was gone.

In South Korea, when fraudulent elections mocked the intelligence of an increasingly frustrated public, it was students who marched in April 1960. Their protests, first dismissed and then violently suppressed, ignited a national uprising which forced president Syngman Rhee to resign and flee.

In Czechoslovakia, the Velvet Revolution was a student-led uprising which ended four decades of authoritarian rule. It started with a peaceful, harmless student march being beaten down by police. What followed was an unstoppable cascade of public mobilisation that ended the old order without a single bullet being fired.

And just last year, the world witnessed perhaps the most remarkable example of a Gen Z-led revolution in Bangladesh. What started as a student protest against an unfair job quota transformed into a nationwide revolt against systemic injustice. These youngsters were not political heirs, they were ordinary students armed with conviction and social media, and who refused to accept a stolen future. Within weeks, they toppled a government that had ruled with absolute impunity.

These examples are not historical curiosities. They can also be viewed as warnings. This country, too, sits on similar fissures — a young population denied opportunities in life, institutions stripped of credibility, governance captured by elite convenience, and people being increasingly convinced that the system has no intention of fixing itself.

With the rise of social media, more specifically TikTok, our youth is more connected, more globally aware than any previous generation. They can witness in real time that their future is shrinking while the entitlements of the powerful, from immunities to privileges, expand.

And yet, instead of confronting these structural failures, all of us seem fixated on constitutional drafting, judicial reshuffling, and procedural theatrics. As if perfecting the legal language will magically revive a system suffering from moral collapse. As if the Constitution is the problem, rather than the unwillingness of those in power to honour its spirit. No amendment can resurrect meritocracy. No judicial reconfiguration can manufacture legitimacy. No procedural fix can compensate for a culture that treats justice as optional and opportunity as negotiable.

If Pakistan truly wants stability, it must confront the corruption that chokes governance, the manipulation that empties democracy of meaning, the elite capture that smothers opportunity, and the hopelessness driving a generation to the airport with eyes filled with tears and one-way tickets in hand.

If there is one thing that history teaches us, it is that when states refuse to solve their real problems, the youth, the students step forward to solve it for them. They did it in Athens. They did it in Seoul. They did it in Prague. They did it in Dhaka. So what can stop them from doing it in Pakistan?

The writer is a lawyer.

X: *@sheheryarzaidi*

Published in Dawn, November 29th, 2025