At The Threshold: Pakistan’s Youth and Politics of Refusal

Sometime in the early twentieth-century, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci wrote from his prison cell that the modern state maintains its power not only through coercion, but by slowly shaping consent in the everyday spaces of life; schools, courts, newspapers, the press — and most of all — universities. His idea, really, was simple enough: the state does not merely educate their ideal subject, but rather creates it.

Nearly a century later, in a packed auditorium in Lahore, the question returned with a disquieting clarity: who is the ideal citizen in Pakistan today?

The People’s Assembly for Political Rights, organised by the Progressive Student’s Collective, took place on 16th November 2025, at the HRCP. The two go hand-in-hand, as the conception of such a gathering that brought together activists, academics, artists and attorneys could only come from the PSC’s left-wing, collectivist politics. Though featuring prominent speakers — like Imaan Mazari, Arafat Mazhar and Dr Ali Usman Qasmi — an equal space was given to representatives of unions and political groups, covering topics from feminist organising to the issue of missing persons. At the People’s Assembly, everyone had a seat at the table.

Despite a plethora of assertions, the common thread running through the day was a focus on the youth of Pakistan, specifically asking, what can Gen Z do amidst mounting pressure to resort to inaction? What can they do in the face of fear tactics and deliberate silencing? This is not a new problem. In fact, it has been consistently facilitated since 1984, when Zia ul Haq banned student unions in Pakistan. The resulting vacuum has left young people politically present, but institutionally homeless, expected to excel academically while remaining absent as citizens. The repeated return of the Assembly to youth was because it was clear that any attempt at remaking political life had to begin with the generation most consistently denied its political subjecthood. Especially when we have such recent examples of the youth taking prominent action right next to us: in Bangladesh, in Nepal and in Sri Lanka.

Gramsci’s observation that hegemony is reproduced through the “scholastic programme” felt uncannily contemporary. Universities in Pakistan have long been treated as administrative zones rather than intellectual communities, disciplined spaces where political curiosity is to be managed (and potentially suppressed), not encouraged. Dr Qasmi pressed this point further: controlling youth has always been central to the national project and the steady erosion of university autonomy is part of that same logic. Thus, our campuses are engineered to produce students who are academically driven but politically muted, moving through the system, without ever becoming a threat to it.

Multiple speakers described their experiences while mobilising; they spoke about how they had their study circles disrupted, reading groups surveilled, to the point where even planning these seemingly mundane initiatives required its own kind of courage. Then, if the ideal citizen is one who stays silent, the ideal student is simply trained to get there early. A campus without debate, representation or independent mobilisation produces exactly what it is designed to produce, namely young people who do not have the vocabulary to speak, to argue.

That was why the Assembly’s insistence on youth felt like a corrective, something to actually work towards. Gen Z, despite being the most connected generation in the country’s history, has inherited a political landscape structured to keep them peripheral. Yet, the day’s conversations revealed another possibility: that students could act as the system’s most credible challengers. When they spoke of fear, they spoke only of refusing it, of not even taking it into consideration. The vision of the ideal citizen began to stretch into something large. A figure that does not exist as the state imagines them, but as they might imagine themselves, on their own terms.

But what led to the construction of this conversation in the first place? For Ali Abdullah, the Central President of the Progressive Students’ Collective, the purpose of the Assembly was never to just gather a crowd. It had three basic objectives, each shaped by the political exhaustion that each actor shares at the moment. The first was straightforward, but perhaps the hardest: to recover hope. “People protest,” he said, “sit for days in dharnas, post online, keep trying.” But, the state either removes them or makes them irrelevant.

The second objective was to rebuild the social tissue that has thinned so dramatically. “People are scared to take risks,” Abdullah explained, “because after some time you find out that someone took a post or a favour and went quiet.” And the third aim was to decide next steps. Political stagnation, Abdullah noted, cannot be broken by sentiment alone. By the end of the evening, the student organisations had agreed to call for the restoration of student unions. Even the non-student participants — lawyers, academics, activists — publicly endorsed the plan. It was, in his view, the first small move against paralysis. “All three objectives were fulfilled,” he told me afterwards. “Everyone was happy. Hopeful. They kept saying that the despair was too much and we had broken through it.”

In this sense, the Assembly did something subtle but significant. It interrupted, even briefly, the quiet reproduction of the state’s preferred narrative. It created a moment in which students, lawyers, academics and organisers could recognise themselves not as isolated actors navigating personal crises, but as participants in a shared political condition. The insistence that things might be otherwise, could be otherwise, was the closest thing to a counter-hegemonic gesture (as Gramsci describes) that the room produced. And perhaps that alone was enough.

As our afternoon drew to a close, the conversation remained grounded in openness. No one pretended that a single gathering could undo decades of repression or reverse the carefully engineered hollowing-out of political space. What emerged most consistently was a denial to let despair, or ‘ghuttan’ as it was frequently referred to, harden into a permanent state. The word ‘umeed’ kept returning as an argument in itself, a reason for why political life must continue at all. Hope, in this register, was a practice rather than a feeling: the willingness to imagine oneself as part of a collective capable of pushing back.

When people finally stepped out into the evening, the city looked the same, choked in a yellow smog, but the mood was different. Lighter in places, heavier in others, but undeniably altered. A constant refrain amongst the speakers was: “Umeed wapis aa rahi hai” — an acknowledgment that even in a political climate defined by fear and fragmentation, something else remains possible.

The People’s Assembly for Political Rights ended with a unanimously passed declaration that called for, amongst other things, the reinstatement of student unions. The call felt almost inevitable and in some sense answered the question that opened the afternoon: who does the state permit to participate in political life? Following this, everyone, the speakers and audience alike, stood up to recite Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s Intisab and Habib Jalib’s Dastoor, a moment that lasted only a few minutes, but one we would remember for years. If there was hope in that room, it lay in the belief that reclaiming student unions might be the first breach in a system long designed to contain them. If there was hope in that room, it was because those gathered refused to accept the roles they had been assigned.