We mix up wrongdoings with righteous causes. This practice continues with no end in sight. Our student politics is an issue in which we have invested a lot of effort, only without getting any proper solution. Yes, one short-cut “solution” has been floated time and again – the imposition of a complete ban on it.
This is where we observe the tendency among many of us to, if I may use a cliché, “cut off the head to cure the headache.”
We have shown the world that we can cut off the head, sometimes for our betterment, and sometimes for the worse. We broke up Pakistan to form Bangladesh as an independent country. In the formative years of the nation, we cut off many heads of human beings who happened to be riding on the wrong horses of history.
The government once nationalised industrial units, and when it was disillusioned with state capitalism, it started disinvesting enterprises. The nation witnessed a seesaw between presidential and parliamentary systems of governance, and between electoral processes and dictatorial rule in the 70s and 80s.
One morning in 1990, we broke the curfew that was imposed by General HM Ershad to stop a students’ demonstration. That ultimately led to the fall of the man who had ruled the country for nine years.
The elected government of the BNP dissolved the upazila parishad, a system which was introduced to devolve power, largely because Ershad did it. The Awami League-led 14-party government made the Anti-Corruption Commission a toothless tiger because the government the 2007-2008 period empowered the anti-graft body.
Of course, there are other objectives and justifications as well as vested interests behind the taking of extreme steps by successive governments. But, one reason behind such a tendency was the reactive negation of a perceived negation. A more powerful factor, as I understand, is our obsession with history – we want to make or break something.
When there is greater likelihood of the rise of a mob to counteract the culture of impunity, it is very difficult for more civil people to not choose the path of isolation.
So, the mediocre want to become number one in all institutions. This is the effect of the colonial hangover followed by the centralisation of power and authority at the head, which is the prime minister in the present setup. Every criticism, too, is targeted at the head, as our anti-incumbency sentiment has shown.
We have also glorified ourselves by means of protest. We are a proud nation that has fought to uphold our mother tongue in 1952. But in the process of showing hatred to the Urdu language, most of us turned away from learning foreign languages.
In a letter to a newspaper editor following independence, a man from a district town had asked the government to abolish the English department at Dhaka University and other institutions. Because, he argued, Bangladesh became independent in order to establish the Bangla language everywhere.
When Sirajul Islam Chowdhury, professor of English, was asked for his comment, he reportedly said, “The gentleman is not aware that the world is slightly bigger than his hometown.” Nowadays, we feel that we need to learn a number of foreign languages for higher studies, business transactions, and searching for jobs abroad.
We are driven mostly by our whims, not by convictions. The constitution is an example of our failure to pursue prudent policies. Amended 15 times, the constitution has been a major source of crisis in politics.
Our opposition parties since the 90s have felt the necessity of a polls-time interim administration, given the flaws in the electoral system. The stopgap arrangement of a caretaker government was inserted into, and then removed from, the constitution. Both steps were ad hoc.
The case in point is student politics. General Ershad wanted to put an end to it, but it put an end to him, or his regime at least. A ban on student politics is being discussed even today, when there is no student politics as there used to be. When genuine and good students are not involved in politics, and when the politics is not meant for students, how can we term it student politics?
There are college and university units of the AL or the BNP, and mostly the musclemen are their leaders and activists. After the 1990 students’ upsurge, the dissenting voice remains absent on campus. I doubt if we really mean we want to ban student politics in its actual shape.
If the on-campus debates, the grooming of leadership, and raising voices on greater national issues are considered student politics, we need a resumption of those activities. We need elections to student unions to build future leaders of various sectors and professions, not a pool of unproductive people devoid of any profession.
We cannot afford to shut every door of democratic politics.