Time to severe nexus with political parties

Published in The Independent, Dhaka, 10th July, 2009

Recent news about the new central committee of the Jatiyabadi Chatra Dal (JCD), the student's wing of the BNP has attracted national attention because those named for the main positions are middle-aged individuals. Most of the students in the Universities today were not even born when the newly named President entered the university the first time. He is 44 and his close aides are also in their 40s or late 30s. This phenomenon of middle aged students heading a student's party is not particular to the BNP; the AL's student's party, the Bangladesh Chatra League (BCL), is also led by individuals more or less in the same age bracket.

One good initiative that was taken during the emergency was the one intended to end political parties having a student's wing. The initiative was supported by all except those directly involved in the nexus. In the period immediately after the present government took office, that conviction that the nexus is bad for the nation was strengthened as we witnessed the ugliest side of student's politics. In all public universities, students of the BCL ransacked and rampaged dormitories to wrest control from the JCD that had occupied these dormitories while the BNP was in power. A number of these universities had to be closed down due to the violence that resulted from the clashes between the BCL and the JCD. In disgust the Prime Minister resigned from her position as the chief patron of the Bangladesh Chatra League.
Students are the consciousness of the nation; they are the ones upon whom the nation must invest the most because in their hands lie the future of the country. In our history, the students have played a glorious role at different critical times. The Language Movement of 1952, all the movements against the dictatorship of Ayub Khan in our Pakistani days; the 1969 students movement that paved the way for our glorious war of liberation, are all movements in which the students played the major role. In fact, in many instances, the students paved the way that the politicians followed.

With the emergence of Bangladesh, one expected that the need for the students to worry about national politics would be over and they would be able to spend their time as studying so that they could empower themselves with knowledge in building the nation. During our Pakistani days, there was also the lure of international communism that was an added attraction that encouraged the students to participate in national politics as some of these parties were based on the communist or socialist ideology. Bangalee nationalism and international communism that provided the rationale for involvement of students in national politics are history. For a brief period during the Ershad era, it was necessary for the mainstream parties to be assisted by their student's wing for sake of democracy. Since the fall of Ershad, that reason is also a part of history.

The mainstream parties, nevertheless, continued to retain their student's wings although the reasons for their involvement in national politics faded. Student's politics thus began to reflect the same realities of national politics such as conflicts, corruption, extortion and violence. In a very interesting and analytical study entitled "The Freedom Industry and Students Politics in Bangladesh", Iftekhar Sayeed writes: "Student politics has been a deadly, internecine affair. Today, student groups are used by political parties as private armies: they are given guns, told to extort money, taxes and tolls - and bring down the government through violent hartals. They have become a highly criminalised group." In this treatise written in 2006, Sayeed gives spine chilling statistics. In 2001, 47 student politicians were murdered; 44 the following year; 61 the year after and 35 in 2005.
These murders have not been committed for sake of ideology or principle, nor for establishing democracy or any high sounding objectives. These were murders committed by criminals masquerading in our public universities as student leaders. Today, leaders of student's party use their political connections for personal gains; they extort money mafia style and destroy the environment of the educational institutions as they wish. In fact, these leaders indulge in activities that would shame even the hardened criminals. The events in Jahangirnagar University a few years ago where student leaders indulged in gang rape with full knowledge of the university authorities and the political party to which they belonged with neither coming forward for the victim would have shamed any nation.

The criminal activities of the student leaders are widely reported in the media but they fail to arouse the conscience of the political parties who give them more indulgence instead. The reason for the indulgence, as Sayeed has suggested, is to use student parties as private armies to fight political opponents. During the AL's last tenure, President Justice Shahabuddin publicly said that students were getting guns instead of education and urged the students to severe their connections with the political parties. His words fell on deaf ears and the nexus between the student's parties and political parties have grown stronger. The victims of such an undesirable nexus, unfortunately, are the majority of the students who suffer in the form of session jams that take away valuable years from their lives. The public universities of Bangladesh are the only educational institutions in the world where students are delayed by years in passing out because the students parties fight with one another and carry out the negative political agenda of political parties they represent that leads to frequent closure of these institutions.

The emergency we recently had may not have done that much good for the country. It has nevertheless highlighted to us some of the fundamental problems facing the nation. One of them being the revelation of how corrupt, criminalised and conflict ridden is the face of our politics. Student parties acting at the behest of such politics and political parties can only vitiate the educational environment. This is what student politics is doing to the public universities of Bangladesh.
The nexus between the political parties and their students' wings serves the ulterior purposes of just a few, while affecting badly the lives and careers of the general students. No matter how one looks at this nexus, there is just one conclusion to reach: that it is destroying the future of our students and this must end. In the period after the new government came to office and the BCL was re-occupying the dormitories mafia style, there was a picture covered by most newspapers that showed as an inset, a dead body of a student who had just then been killed and in the larger picture, a student flouting a machete that was meant to kill more. It was reminiscent of Burundi-Rwanda where during the genocide such machetes were used for killing millions. That picture should be the nadir for the nation's conscience and unite everybody for a common cause; to retrieve and regain the public universities by breaking the evil nexus for the sake of those who would be leading our nation in future.

The BNP has shown insensitivity in naming a JCD national committee where the leaders named should have been in the party's national committee and not in the JCD. It makes no sense and given the nature of student's politics in recent times, it raises questions about the party's credibility. The AL has no reason to feel better either about its own credibility as it also shown the same indifference for the Prime Minister's decision to distance herself from BCL notwithstanding; the latter has not changed its mafia like activities. The reasons that sustained student politics like the Language Movement, movement for Bangladesh, for international communism, are now part of history. There are no reasons for the students to be involved in national politics anymore. It is time that the "umbilical cord" between the two is severed for the sake of the students who are the future of Bangladesh.