LAHORE — On August 8, the military government of President Pervez Musharraf declared that its previously announced plan to privatise Pakistan's educational institutions would not take place.

A month earlier, the announcement by Punjab provincial governor Lieutenant-General Khalid Maqbool that state schools would be denationalised sparked a protest movement of teachers across Punjab.

On July 29, about 200 teachers were arrested in Lahore while they were trying to enter a girls college for a protest meeting. The police's brutal handling of the mostly women teachers provoked widespread public outrage.

Almost all political parties, trade unions and other civil society organizations supported the teachers.

Fearing that the teachers' protest movement would spread from Punjab to other areas of Pakistan, the military regime decided to make a retreat on its schools privatisation plan.

[Raja Mehboob Hussain is the information secretary of the Punjab Professors and Lecturers Association. Farooq Tariq is general secretary of the Labour Party Pakistan.]

From Green Left Weekly, August 21, 2002.
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