- Intolerance threatens leading teaching institutions
The venerable hundred years plus Punjab University may be the oldest seat of learning in Pakistan, but nowadays it’s Lahore campus hardly appears the safest or most peaceful of places to visit for a stranger or an outsider, however well-intentioned and innocuous his purpose. The adverse publicity over arrest and production in handcuffs of the previous vice-chancellor before a National Accountability Court had hardly died down when the august institute was again under media spotlight for another scandal, an unfortunate case of university vigilantism. A husband who had reached the campus for picking up his wife, a post-graduate student, was roughed up reportedly by activists of that talented outfit in the personal assault department, the Islami Jamiat Taleba (IJT). While perhaps grudgingly accepting that the earth revolves around the sun and not vice-versa, unlike some European ideological forbears centuries ago, their attitude and mindset regarding co-education and social intermingling on campus harks back to the Stone Age. These modern-day Puritans consider themselves the final defenders and arbiters of society’s religious, ideological and cultural norms, with the tiny proviso that the truth is always what they say it is.
The vice-chancellor has suspended five of the ‘self-righteous’ students as also the security guard who perhaps wisely, knowing the perpetrators, but totally unprofessionally, watched the beating without intervening. The vice-chancellor will now have to act decisively with exemplary disciplinary action, unlike some of his opportunist predecessors who conveniently quailed before the IJT, as the evil is now spreading beyond the perimeters of hallowed Punjab University. Private Beaconhouse school system and another educational pride of Lahore, University of Management Sciences, have lately also become targets of orchestrated hate campaigns and threats, and the Punjab governor, as the PU chancellor, and a worldly-wise man, should ensure that the recent husband-bashing is the last such violent episode on campus, best left to irate ‘better-half’s’ in the privacy of the home! Fearful and hypocritical appeasement of campus vigilantism must end if scholarship and creativity are to flourish. And PM Imran Khan too should recall his shocking manhandling and detention by these selfsame misguided custodians and champions of morality back in November 2007, within the PU precincts. So, no timid surrenders this time.
