From Lahore, with longing: A letter to Abhijeet Dipke

Sapan News is republishing this piece, with permission, as a public service initiative in the interest of making such views more accessible and to promote cross-border understanding. See the Press Statement: Access is not a threat: A call to lift reciprocal news bans in India and Pakistan. The article below first appeared in Scroll, titled ‘A letter from Lahore for Abhijeet Dipke: We watch with wonder and longing. Please credit the original publication and Sapan News when sharing or republishing.

Article below republished from Scroll

Beyond Borders

A letter from Lahore for Abhijeet Dipke: We watch with wonder and longing

There could be no better month than August to rethink our collective freedom from imperial rule.

By Ehtesham Hassan

Dear Abhijeet,

I am writing to you from Lahore, a city that breathes the same dusty air as Delhi. I am a young activist here, part of a generation that has grown up in the long, flickering shadow of a border. I am writing to you because, after a long time, the news coming from your side of the fence felt like staring into a mirror.

When the Chief Justice of India used the word “cockroach” to describe the young and unemployed, young people I know here in Pakistan recognised that word instantly. It is the way the powerful across South Asia look at the millions of us who are “surplus”, the graduates without jobs, the students whose dreams are sold in leaked exam papers, the young who are expected to be grateful for the crumbs.

By naming your movement the Cockroach Janata Party, you took the stone thrown at you and used it to start building a house.

In Lahore, we often feel like we are living in a silent version of your protest. Our struggle is the same: the Medical and Dental College Admission Test scandals mirror your crisis where the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test was leaked. Our families go into the same crushing debt for coaching centres, our youth bulge is also becoming a youth burden. But in Pakistan, the air is sometimes a little heavier.

Exam leaks are just the tip of it. Zooming out, we all face common issues: unemployment, poverty, poor living standards across borders. Your protest feels refreshing and full of hope for millions of us here as well.

There could be no better month than August to rethink our collective freedom from imperial rule. We lost millions during the Partition of 1947. But what did we achieve if millions of us still lack the basics of life after 80 years of independence?

Gen Z is in the best position to raise these questions to governments and to themselves. We cannot wait for another century to get the basics right. We must act now by educating, uniting and mobilising youngsters.

We look at the images and videos from India with a sense of wonder. There is a courage in being “visible”. Here, we have learned that visibility comes with a high price. We have had to find quieter ways to exist, to organise in the margins, and to keep the fire alive when the cameras are turned away.

I won’t lie to you: there is envy here – not a bitter envy, but a longing. We watch your digital space, 22 million followers in a fortnight, and we think of what we could do if our own digital corridors were as wide.

We watch the way your civil society shows up for you, and we dream of a day when the youth of the entire subcontinent can stand together, not as “Indians” or “Pakistanis”, but as a people who have been denied a future by the same, old-world politics.

The “cockroach” is the perfect metaphor for us, isn’t it? The cockroach doesn’t care for the Radcliffe Line. It survives in the cracks of the walls we build between us. It outlives empires. It is the ultimate witness to the failures of the powerful.

I see your struggle as a warning and a promise. The warning is that the tactics used to silence youth, internet shutdowns, the dismissal of student grief, the branding of dissent as “anti-national”, are a shared regional language. But the promise is in your resilience. If you can stand up in Delhi, it gives a little more oxygen to a student in Lahore or Karachi who feels like they are suffocating.

But in the young Indian student crying over a leaked exam paper, I see a sibling. When I see you standing against a system that calls you a parasite, I see a version of myself that is allowed to speak.

Keep the streets, Abhijeet. Keep the satire. Keep the pestilence of your presence alive. As long as you are standing, the idea of a Young South Asia remains possible.

We are watching from the other side of the mirror. We are different, yet we are the same. We are the ones they forgot to count, but we are the only ones who can count the cost of their failures.

They can spray all they want. We have already learned how to breathe underwater.

With hope and shared history,

A Voice from Lahore

Ehtesham Hassan is a freelance brand designer and a progressive activist in Lahore.

*Why ‘Southasia’ as one word? Because our histories entangle, our struggles intersect, and our futures are bound together.

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