THE attacks on the protests that national minority students held on January 15 and the attacks on a rally that mostly students held the next day in protest at the attacks on the January 15 protests are as unsavoury as equally outrageous. Students of national minorities, banded as the Aggrieved Indigenous Students and People, held protests at the National Curriculum and Textbook Board office against the removal of a graffito, which contained the word 鈥榓divasi鈥�, from the back cover of a secondary textbook and to push for their demand for constitutional recognition of the national minorities and the inclusion of their history in textbooks. After the protesters had reached there after a rally on the University of Dhaka campus, a group of university-based students, Students for Sovereignty, which had earlier demanded the removal of the graffito at hand before the textbook board removed it, brutally attacked the national minority protesters with cricket stumps, leaving at least 11 of them wounded, three of them grievously. The Students for Sovereignty people attacked the national minority students twice, not only in police presence but also with the police not having lifted even a finger to stave off the attacks.
What remains further worrying is that the police, who had not even tried to head off the attacks, attacked larger protests of students, joined in by ordinary people, banded as the Aggrieved Students and People, when they held a march after a rally on the University of Dhaka campus on January 16. The police barricaded the road near the education ministry, blocked the march, used water cannons, stun grenades and charged at them with truncheons, leaving at least seven injured. The police, the government for that matter, were well in the know of an ensuing trouble at the textbook board office as the national minority students had announced their programme well before the Students for Sovereignty so did. Whilst the January 15 attacks on national minority students constitute an inroad into the rights of citizens to voice their protests, which was peaceful, the attacks also suggest that the government allowed the attackers to force national minorities into a fearful state that has been typical of successive chauvinistic governments. It was expected that in the changed political context, the interim government, installed on August 8 after the overthrow of the Awami League regime, would make a difference. The police attacks on the larger protests on January 16 only corroborate this proposition. The government in the morning on January 16 condemned, sounding a warning against such attacks and mentioning the arrest of a couple of people in this connection. Without taking action when there was time, such condemnation is not enough. Still, if the government had meant it, the police attacks should not have happened.
It is time that the government understood that national minorities are also citizens of the country with equal entitlements and failure to ensure their protection and security could well make an inroad into the sovereignty. The government should, therefore, not only ensure their security and hold to account every quarter responsible for the attacks, but it should also bring about changes in its chauvinistic policy on the minorities, national or religious.
