Zero tolerance against campus violence needed
The IJT, the JI’s student wing, has again proved that it has learnt nothing and forgotten nothing over the past many decades. True to its culture, it recently resorted to such ugly actions as locking up teachers, fighting pitched battles with the police following Punjab University (PU) administration orders to get a boys hostel vacated for the girl students accommodated in overcrowded makeshift rooms. Since the second sex is just that in the IJT mindset, a poor second, it simply could not digest the PU’s ‘illogical stance’ in the matter. The IJT cadre responded an orgy of street violence: burning a bus and harassing drivers and snatching vehicles’ keys and turning off engines smack in the middle of the all-important Canal Road artery, thus creating massive traffic jams virtually paralysing Lahore’s entire transport system.
Some time back, the IJT allegedly provided safe haven to Al-Qaeda operatives in the PU hostels, then there was disturbance over a change of contractor in the PU canteen and the latest explosion of violence was the inevitable culmination of these simmering disputes of the past two months. What a well-deserved black name all this needless rioting must have brought to the IJT in the public eye, while setting back the academic curriculum and traumatizing teachers with its violence. One can discount the police’s routine charges of three liquor bottles and contraband being found in the IJT activists’ rooms, there were still eleven solid indictments, including under the Anti-Terrorism Act, leading to the arrest of 21 with raids ongoing for others. The IJT has for years followed a policy of striking at the heads of their opponents, and with a hardliner at the JI’s helm, little change is expected in its outlook in the near future. The PML-N’s Punjab education minister meanwhile has issued a strong statement: zero tolerance against elements that create law and order crisis in educational institutions. But then both the PML-N and the JI being ideologically on the same side of the political divide, the latter was given a free run of the PU for the last five years, expecting an alliance in 2013. That political gain did not materialize, but damage has been done.
Ultimately, it is up to the JI leadership to rein in its unruly campus bands and turn their excess of violent youthful energy into something constructive. Let peace prevail on the campuses at least, by a policy of live and let live and by debating an issue rather than ramming their views down their rival’s throats, literally.