The standard diagnosis of Pakistani youth and politics goes like this. Young people are apathetic. They don't vote. They don't organise. They are distracted by screens and consumed by cynicism. The solution, according to this diagnosis, is civic education. Teach them how democracy works, and they will participate.

The diagnosis is wrong. And the condescension embedded in it is part of the problem.

Pakistani youth are not disengaged from politics. Anyone who spent time near a university in 2022 and 2023 watched something that has not been seen in this country in a generation.

Young people, most of them first-time voters, organising without being paid to, travelling to rallies without being bused in, following court proceedings in real time, learning the names of constitutional clauses. Whatever one thinks of the political movement that produced this energy, the energy itself was not apathy. It was the opposite of apathy.

What it was, more precisely, was a demand for performance. Not ideology. Not ethnicity. Not the inherited loyalties that have structured Pakistani electoral politics since 1970. A demand that the institutions claiming democratic authority actually function as democratic institutions. The courts decide on the law rather than on the instruction. That elections produce governments that govern. That a parliament sitting in session is not merely providing cover for decisions made elsewhere.

This is a more sophisticated political demand than the ones that preceded it. And it has been met, consistently, with a political........

© The Friday Times