Campus Violence: When Student Politics Became Armed Gangs

University and college campuses in Pakistan didn’t become armed and violent by accident. The pattern traces back to a specific political decision, made deliberately by more than one party, to treat students as a resource worth organizing and arming for entirely non-academic ends.

How Students Became a Political Weapon

Both Jamaat-e-Islami and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party used student politics to advance their own political goals. It was the movement against Ayub Khan that first planted the idea firmly in political minds: student activism could be organized and directed for a party’s own purposes, not just tolerated as youthful idealism on the sidelines. Political parties responded by building their own student wings, and didn’t stop at organizing them – they armed them, and funded them generously. Jamaat-e-Islami’s own wing, Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba, was in fact far older than this era of weaponized student politics – it had been founded on 23 December 1947, just months after Pakistan itself came into being, originally as a body for promoting Islamic values on campus rather than as an armed political faction. The PPP’s Peoples Students Federation, and later the Muttahida Qaumi Movement’s All Pakistan Mohajir Students Organization, became the other two of the three most powerful wings, but similar organizations spread across every university and college in the country, each backed by a party willing to supply money and, when needed, weapons.

When the Administration Lost Control

Within those campuses, the student wings grew powerful enough that university vice-chancellors and college principals eventually found themselves unable to make a single meaningful decision without those organizations’ consent. Effective authority over campus life had passed from the institutions themselves to the armed political factions operating inside them – and the one policy move meant to fix exactly this problem ended up making it worse. Citing campus violence as justification, General Zia-ul-Haq imposed a nationwide ban on elected student unions on February 9, 1984, after Sindh had already outlawed them in 1979. Elected unions, whatever their flaws, had at least been accountable to the student body that voted them in and could, in principle, be voted out; the party-backed wings that survived the ban answered to no one on campus at all, only to their parties, and Jamaat-e-Islami’s own alliance with Zia’s government meant the Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba in particular was left free to operate with little real interference even as its rivals were formally illegal. The numbers bear out how badly the ban backfired: across the roughly thirty-six years that elected student unions had functioned before 1984, some thirteen students had been killed in campus political violence nationwide; in the twenty years after the ban, that toll climbed to around 165.

Once established at that level of power, these organizations increasingly took on the character of patrons for outright criminal activity, and some effectively formed their own mafia-style syndicates on campus. Armed clashes between rival factions followed, with real casualties: between January 1990 and August 1991 alone, 580 armed incidents involving students were recorded, with 73 people killed in Punjab in that period alone.

A Generation Chasing the Wrong Ladder

Part of what makes this such a serious blow to the state of education is what it did to students’ own ambitions. Instead of directing their energy toward academic achievement, many students redirected it toward finding a path upward through exactly these criminal-linked organizations – correctly calculating that patronage from an armed student faction could open doors that grades never would.

The clearest evidence of how far that calculation paid off: several political parties came to include student leaders in their ranks against whom multiple murder cases had been formally registered – and in every one of those cases, the leader’s political standing was enough to keep the university administration from ever being able to lay a hand on him. The murder charges stayed on paper. The political career, and the campus power that came with it, continued uninterrupted. More than a third of a century after Zia’s ban, elected student unions remain illegal in Pakistan to this day, a rare point of continuity across governments that have otherwise agreed on very little – even as the informal, unelected, party-armed successors the ban was supposed to weaken have continued operating on campuses largely unchanged.