Challenging interests.

Byline: Faisal Bari

WHEN women want to organise, vocalise, come out and agitate for their rights, there is a much stronger reaction from the state and society than, say, when religious groups come out onto the streets and even immobilise cities.

When students want their rights and a voice in governance, or wish to be effectively heard as decisions about them are taken, the same thing happens. Tremendous pressure is exerted against allowing any space for students to organise around. Unions are banned, student involvement in politics is decried and legitimate demands are delegitimised. Even when absolutely unacceptable issues such as video surveillance and blackmail have surfaced, they have been suppressed and not investigated properly.

Arbitrary rules and regulations (distance between males and females, dress codes for women, the question of student participation in public protests and so on) continue to be applied by various universities to the young people. Though the Higher Education Commission (HEC) tends to over-regulate space in various areas, even on issues such as how long an academic year should be, or for how many months should the summer semester extend, it has not come forward with any guidelines for addressing the students' demands and legitimate concerns.

When geographic or ethnic groups talk of human rights abuses and attempt to start conversations on rights for all, the state comes down on such people as hard as it can. The leaders and activists of the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement have been experiencing the full weight of state authority, power and monopoly over violence for some time now.

All these recent movements ask for rights that are enshrined in the basic document of the country.

Is there something common across these movements? A number of things suggest themselves. All these movements ask for rights that are enshrined in the basic document of the country. All these movements have a lot of young people involved in them. All these movements are from groups that are outside the entrenched powerful groups that currently hold power in Pakistan. All these groups are relatively new or have started to come together quite recently so that established power centres have not had time to penetrate some of them in the same way that the more established groups have been able to.

This takes us to the debate about whether anyone is ever 'elected' in our democracy, or are all 'selected' by established power centres? Recently, a...