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on system and all rights of the student community
2) Struggle for free education for all
3) Struggle for improvement in the conditions of all educational institues
4) Promote peace, tolerence and unity amongst students
5) To link students with the international movements against capitalist, imperialist oppression. To those of you who have been associated with the Left in Pakistan and with progressive student politics in particular, the National Students Federation (NSF) is a familiar name. It is ironic that despite the passage of many decades since your student days, people such as yourself need less of an introduction to the NSF than do the young people who comprise the NSF today. It is precisely to bring the legacy of progressive student politics back into public consciousness and to remind ourselves that the dream of a just, equal, and truly free society is not a relic of the past but the destination for which we still strive, that after decades of deafening silence in Left and progressive circles, we decided to revive the NSF. A Background to the Revival of the NSF
It is heartening that in recent years there has been a slow yet steady revival of the Left in Pakistan. The impetus to resurrect the NSF is indeed part of this larger revival. As is known to most of you, NSF was an independent students’ organization created in 1955 in the wake of the ban imposed on its predecessor, the Democratic Students Federation (DSF). After reaching its peak in the anti-dictatorship movements of the 1960s and ‘70s, undergoing a decade of fragmentation and decline in the 80s and virtually disappearing in the 90s, it was in 2008, in the wake of the anti-Musharraf movement, that we- initially just a handful of ideologically motivated and politically active youngsters in different parts of Punjab- decided it was time to rebuild the NSF. Why we felt the need to revive the NSF and left-wing student politics generally, is based on
reasons well known to us all. The multiple crises that afflict Pakistani society today can be seen most acutely in the form of rising unemployment, unprecedented price hikes, su***de bombings, military operations, drone attacks, extra-judicial abductions, targeted killings, and perhaps most frighteningly, the apathy, hopelessness and cynicism of the young generation. While these crises are on the one hand a result of the confluence of imperialist powers, international financial institutions, the Pakistani ruling classes, and the self-proclaimed defenders of Islam, they have also been aided by the absence of a cohesive, dynamic, and vibrant Left movement. Without a politically conscious, active, and driven young cadre which can reintroduce to its peers the ideals of social justice and resistance to the status-quo, we feel that this society can have no hope of pulling itself out of the quicksand it finds itself in. Same Vision, New Conditions
While being proud of our idealism, we are also cognizant of our troubled past and of the difficult realities which confront us today. Like so many other progressive organizations, NSF is no longer a part of young people’s vocabulary. The ‘Left’ today is an unknown entity to the majority of Pakistanis, particularly to the working-class and oppressed peoples whose interests we claim to represent. The reasons for the fragmentation of the Left in Pakistan are probably better known to you than to us. We are writing to you not to excavate the past, but for help in building the future. While we whole-heartedly claim to be descendants of the same political tradition which was handed down to us from your generation, we are not ready to live in the past or to inherit the internal divisions that have plagued the history of the Left. We are conscious of the need to build a vivacious, dynamic and popular student organization which, above all else, is relevant in today’s complex scenario and responsive to the needs and desires of the current student population among whom we are building our roots. We are also conscious that internal weaknesses were an important factor in the decline of the Left in Pakistan, in particular a lack of democracy within Left organizations, over-centralization of decision-making, as well as insensitivity to issues of national representation. With the spirit of attempting to learn from our mistakes, we have gone about rebuilding our organization from the bottom-up, both in internal-structural and national-regional terms. The Rebuilding Process
Rather than NSF (Pakistan) as the organization was previously called, we have chosen to reorganize ourselves as NSF (Punjab). Apart from being an attempt to consciously delimit our territorial and representational jurisdiction to that of a federating unit rather than assume the role of ‘center’, we also felt the need to focus our energies on Punjab because of its relatively high level of de-politicization and the greater need for a strong progressive movement in the proverbial “belly of the beast”. While much of our work has been in Punjab, we have simultaneously been working with autonomous federating units in other parts of the country, in particular with NSF Sindh1. Though NSF Punjab and NSF Sindh have independent decision making bodies and organizational structures, the two work in close co-ordination on fundamental matters such as developing NSF’s constitution, manifesto, and organizational program, and jointly publish the quarterly NSF organ “The Student”. Recently, a central organizing committee was formed for the purpose of planning the eventual merger of the two bodies as well as entrusted with the task of beginning work in the areas we have not yet approached. Three years after we began the rebuilding process, we now feel ready to hold NSF Punjab’s first Convention. We believe that this Convention will be a crucial impetus for the establishment of the NSF in the sphere of student politics, the spark that will get our engines running. It will be a means for us not only to consolidate the efforts we have made over these last few years, it will also give our generation an opportunity to meet yours; to reconnect with our political kin, our history, our heroes, our stories, and our dreams, all of which have been invisible to us who have grown up in times of cynicism, confusion, and conformism. Our Convention will be, we hope, the dawn of what many of you had hoped for: a gathering of new, energetic, driven young people announcing their arrival into the realm of progressive politics.