THE death of at least six in attacks on July 16 by the ruling Awami League’s student wing Chhatra League and the police on students protesting against and seeking reforms in quota for public service recruitment is shocking. The armed attacks in July 15–16 on unarmed students, who were holding protests peacefully, have also left more than 350 students wounded by July 16 on campuses of the University of Dhaka, Jahangirnagar University, Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Eden Girls’ College and in Chattogram. Three died in attacks by the Chhatra League in Chattogram, two in attacks by the Chhatra League and the Awami League’s youth wing Juba League in Dhaka and one another died in attacks by the police in Rangpur. But all this appears to be the classic proverbial case of ‘give a dog a bad name and hang him.’ Whilst the Awami League has used a parochial partisan view of the liberation war spirit pitched against the universal spirit of the glorious war by calling the protesters and their sympathisers razakars, the people who collaborated with the killer Pakistani regime in the 1971 war, at night on July 14, the protests were forced into violence by the party’s general secretary Obaidul Quader, also the roads and bridges minister, who at a press conference on July 15 said that the Chhatra League was ready to counter the quota protesters. This was enough of a provocation.
The Awami League and its fronts have always used the trick of besmirching the sections of people who have tried to make their voice heard for the right cause and, then, get at them. There has not been any exception this time, too. The government of the Awami League deployed its fronts and the state agency for law enforcement to hound the quota protesters, who are trying to champion — along with the liberation war promises of equality, social justice and human dignity, as enshrined in Bangladesh’s proclamation of independence — the indefeasible constitutional right to assembly, the right to protest and the right to expression. Whilst quota in public service recruitment, now heavily tilted towards grandchildren of freedom fighters, runs counter to the war-time promises, this also constitutes an insult to the freedom fighters who fought for an egalitarian society where no one would be subjected to any form of discrimination. The intransigence of the government, the executive for that matter, also makes the affair complicated beyond reparation. Whilst the executive says that it has nothing to do with reforms in the quota system and the issue would be resolved in court, the High Court in its full verdict on July 14 said that the government could frame rules and guidelines to ensure the participation of backward sections of the citizens in public service recruitment as it did in its short verdict on July 11, stating that the government is at liberty to change, reduce or increase the ratio or percentage of quota. The executive could have resolved the issue easily much before it ran into such a perilous pass.
The Awami League and the government it presides over must realise that they are badly in need of a course correction out of such a precarious position. All the people who killed the six must be brought to justice through a credible investigation.