When I was returning to Pakistan after completing my master’s in the UK, several people bade me farewell with pity in their eyes and spoke words of solace. It was almost like a mourning, as if it was obvious that I had suffered a great loss. The loss is typically described in terms of an apparent reduction in a woman’s mobility, security and general ease. I posit, however, that it is about more than roaming around in cobbled streets after midnight. What one loses is essentially political, though the experience is deeply personal.

Young Pakistani academics who go abroad experience an unregulated freedom they are not accustomed to. Suddenly, their research can touch on issues they would think about twice before addressing on social media or even among a group of friends.

It is not that foreign universities give Pakistani students a voice, far from it. What they gain is not the pen but the paper. What they get is access to a platform, research tools, academic rigour and the freedom to pursue a topic without fearing for their lives.

Social science research is not a process of aggrandisement. It is expected to make people uncomfortable by raising questions that break the silence barricading local knowledge production.

A friend has decided not to publish her political science dissertation online because she does not want to come under the radar. Another is pining for an international scholarship to leave the country to learn without boundaries and to write without fear. Yet another is willing to do anything to not have to return from the US after her master’s because she knows her opinions will land her in hot water back home.

After legitimising my presence next to the white board using my prized foreign degree stamp, I stand in front of my students, giving disingenuous disclaimers so that I am not seen as “anti-state”.

What gets labelled as brain drain, described by some people as a faithless betrayal of their people those who manage to get out to never return can frequently be asylum seeking. In many cases the academics are refugees knocking on foreign doors for as little as a room of their own. I know many students, contemporaries and seniors who treat a scholarship as a golden ticket because they know that they will be finally allowed the space to produce critical work without fearing for their lives, livelihoods and professional credibility. Those who choose to return get labelled as naïve or adventurous and quicly put in their place.

Social science research is not a process of aggrandisement. It is expected to make people uncomfortable by raising questions that break the silence barricading local knowledge production.

Critical thinking is a buzzword now, ornamenting higher education institutions in Pakistan, with any attempt to practice it resulting in a slap on the hand.

Around 80 students were arrested in Quetta for peacefully protesting against the digital divide that is depriving many of their right to education. I want to put it as plainly as possible: if there is no internet there can be no online classes. If students do not have the right to raise their concerns then how are we to move around this business of education? Do the HEC and the education ministry want to pretend their way out of this mess? Do they want to use police batons to erase the stark oppression of the students’ right to mobilise? Do they simply imagine that there is no digital inequality?

When students and teachers are villainised, suppressed and silenced, it is not an unintentional consequence or a spill-over of a decadent education system, it is a strategic dismissal of those who do not treat education as a business but as an intrinsic struggle towards intellectual growth. It is a well-crafted reduction of the education system to a tool of propagating a specific narrative where dissent is treason, activism is criminal and critical thinking is blasphemous.

KK Aziz had warned that, “The goal (of education in Pakistan) is to produce a generation with the following traits; docility, inability to ask questions, capacity to indulge in pleasurable illusions, pride in wearing blinkers, willingness to accept guidance from above, alacrity to like and dislike things by order, tendency to ignore gaps in one’s knowledge, enjoyment of make-believe, faith in the high value of pretences.”

Those who don’t see themselves in this checklist, seek refuge in places where they can write about what they have left behind. Those who cannot afford this privilege are criminalised for living their politics. Those who either adapt to the mores or find it too exhausting to raise their hands to ask questions, become model citizens.