Thanks to social media, the Gen Z today starts getting political awareness as early as 12 years of age. The earlier generations — Millennials and Boomers — would get the same level of awareness when they were in their mid-20s and at that age, they had already assumed familial responsibilities, due to which they could not actively participate in resistance movements.
Lawyer and social activist Jibran Nasir made this potent remark at a recent podcast for the YouTube channel of Off The School. He discussed Pakistan’s issues, democracy, need for structural reforms and even some praiseworthy aspects of our governance system with journalist Najam Soharwardi and academic Munib Raza.
Nasir dismissed this impression that the youth of today — Gen Z — is more courageous than their elders as they are willing to actively resist the system they believe to be oppressive. The lawyer said that due to the advent of social media, Gen Z starts becoming politically aware from a young age when they do not have any responsibility to fulfil for their families. As the youths are only responsible for themselves, they have the luxury to actively participate in resistance movements, he remarked.
He drew the attention towards the life of leaders like Bacha Khan and others who spent several years of their lives in jail and asked if they were not brave.
However, he maintained that the tactics to suppress dissent and resistance that were employed by the powers that be in the past would not work in the present because of the mass political awareness among the younger generation. He said the youth must be engaged with in a constructive manner and they should be allowed to channel their voices through student unions.
On the importance of student unions, he said the elections of student unions in New Delhi is a major event in the Indian capital and a holiday is observed when the elections take place. He also mentioned the massive attention, which the recent student union elections in the Dhaka University were able to draw.
To a question about the recent uprising in Nepal and the earlier resistance movements in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, Nasir cautioned the youth against adopting a violent path. He said the real power establishment was not at all affected in Nepal, Bangladesh or Sri Lanka and it was just the political class that bore the brunt of violence in those countries.
He said any such movement in Pakistan would only cause a superficial change. To explain his point, he said it was a general impression in the country that former military dictator Gen Pervez Musharraf had to eventually abdicate because of the lawyers’ movement but when Musharraf was himself asked what caused his downfall, he did not name the lawyers’ movement but blamed his second-in-command Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani for it.
Nasir spent a considerable time discussing how the democratic leaders actually hurt democracy in the country. He said it was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who suspended the fundamental rights of the citizens just a day after the Constitution of 1973 was promulgated. He also asked whether Bhutto had the right to assume the power after the 1971 debacle.
The lawyer said what the country needed the most was structural reforms. He advised the people to vote for those whose political agenda included structural reforms.
When the discussion turned towards the Western powers and their democratic values, Nasir unhesitatingly rejected the notion that the West was more civilised. He said the Hindus and Muslims in India had not been lynching each other in the early 1900s but lynching Blacks was common in the United States then.
He said it were the British who stoked the religious divide in India for their political gains. He added that the British caused the famine of Bengal that resulted in a large number of deaths.
Even today, Nasir said, our government hospitals provided treatment and medical consultations against a nominal fee, whereas, the health care in the United States was so expensive that expatriates living there often came to Pakistan to have their teeth cured.
On the issue of power cuts in Karachi, he said it was severe injustice to enable a private company’s monopoly over the power distribution in the entire megalopolis.