The Islami Jamiat-i-Talaba (IJT) has once again harassed and beaten up innocent students at the Punjab University (PU). The IJT activists (read goons) continued with their traditional terror spree when they assaulted five students and injured them critically. The reason cited for this incident was ideological differences between the IJT and the Insaaf Students Federation (ISF). The ISF had launched a membership drive at the PU’s Hailey College of Commerce, which the IJT could not tolerate. This is nothing new. The IJT is notorious for spreading terror in various colleges and universities, especially the PU. In a rather strange decision, both the IJT and ISF students were suspended by the university administration.

The IJT has held the premier institution of the subcontinent, the oldest and the largest seat of higher learning, hostage to its violent politics for more than 30 years now. IJT goons have routinely interfered in the administrative matters of the university and influenced the admissions, allotment of hostel accommodation and imposed its arbitrary ‘code of conduct’ on students. The decline in the standard of the PU is evident from the inability of its students to compete in the job market. 

The emergence of PU as an IJT stronghold dates back to Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s time when Ghulam Mustafa Khar was appointed the Governor of Punjab. Khar started a campaign against his opponents, especially the leftists within the PPP. Since the PU had a progressive and leftist faculty and students body back then, the former governor covertly supported the IJT in establishing its hegemony at the PU. Khar’s misadventures laid the foundation of a right wing, terrorist student faction. During General Zia’s era, the IJT spread its wing under the state’s pro-jihad policy. Anyone who so much as said anything against the Zia regime at the PU had to bear the brunt of IJT’s violence. This made most of the leftist faculty leave the university, resulting in a loss for the coming generations of students who never had the opportunity to learn from the best minds in Pakistan. 

The IJT, just like its parent political party — the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI) — forces people to resist secularism and progressiveness. It promotes its own brand of Islamic ideology on campus. It is therefore not a coincidence that the tradition of freethinking that an institution of higher learning is supposed to inculcate in its students has gradually faded at the PU, leaving a culture of suppression and suffocation in its place. The Punjab government must take note of the harassment by IJT students on campus and take its goons to task. The PU must not lose its glory because of a bunch of fanatics who continue ad nauseam to spread terror in the name of Islam.