On Student Protests, Overthrowing Governments and its Aftermath: Bangladesh.

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” – Henry David Thoreou

I joined Delhi University, as a college hostler in the year 1990, just a few months before the agitation against the Mandal Commission reservation started in August. 

It was still our ragging period, which that year for hostlers had extended till Dussehra, I have described in my novel Across Borders. 

One morning, after I came to my class, which used to be rather late every single day, as I was on the court/field playing inter collegiate Basketball, only for which I had managed to get an admission into the Bachelor of Commerce( honors) course, that needed a cut off of marks above 97/98 percent. This was in spite of my mother, an ex teacher of that college for 8 years along with the principal, insisting I should take English honors instead, as my marks in the subject were better than all other subjects and I had the requisite for that course. 

I didn’t want to take up a course that I knew I was to be good in, but which in my opinion had not much practical utility, other than my becoming a teacher I wasn’t interested in. Though for many years, I have been a formal trainer/coach in my work assignments. Teaching was something I inherited from my mother, who retired from a teachers training college as principal. I have even accompanied her for practice teaching sessions at schools to review her students. 

So this particular morning, in 1990, in my college in Delhi University, suddenly a couple of senior girls, hostellers incidentally from Bihar came into our class and asked the entire class, that is all those who wished to, to follow them out. I thought this was again some sort of a ‘ragging’ and even though I was extremely tired from hard core basket ball practice, I didn’t want to risk being ‘boycotted’ for defying or ‘‘boycotting’ the ragging. 

Soon we were loaded into a big bus outside the college gate.  On looking around, I had the assurance of seeing my roommates and several of my batchmates, along with several faces I did not recognise. 

“Where are they taking us?” I  looked at my roommates questioningly, “Where are we even going?”

“To India Gate,” came the prompt reply from one of the seniors who had brought us out of class.

On the bus, already having picked several students from different colleges with the final stop in front of Delhi school of economics, that’s in front of the back gate of Kirori Mal college, someone made a speech on the cause we were up against. It was the Mandal Commission reservation. It recommended a 27% reservation quota for OBC resulting in a total 49.5% quota in government jobs and public universities. V.P Singh, the Prime Minister implemented the recommendations in August 1990 which had led to the protests. 

The senior who was in the bus gave us a brief, but it was so concise that it didn’t really register in my mind what we were going to do.

Now this was the time way before the internet or Google, much before it was all on the palm of our hands on a smartphone. So all we knew was we were going to participate in a rally in front of India Gate. We were just like a herd of cattle being led to obstruct the government’s decision, and what better way than to be left in front of the India Gate, so that we would literally obstruct any movement.

On the driveway, to the India Gate flanked  by heavy chains, we were let out of the bus and we marched ahead in the August heat of Delhi in human chains. Suddenly,  to my  unimaginable thought at that time, the police started a lathi charge and the crowd dispersed. I even felt a smack on my shin or maybe I imagined it, then we turned and started running. It was all so crazy and chaotic as tear gas shells were hurled at us. They erupted all around me. Now we broke into a run away from the gate, with the police charging us. The best we could do was run into the chained barricades and keep running. I was a good runner back then. As atleast we would not be hit by the huge thick lathis, or worse break our heads from falling on the road, even if hit with tear gas that we would survive. 

A long way off, running in total panic and I being dead tired from the several rounds of jogging around a 400 mt track, followed by rigorous basketball practice, I abruptly stopped. I couldn’t decide which was more painful, exerting my rigid and resisting muscles to the point of tearing or being hit by lathis. Thankfully, standing, bending low, after I finished doing the post run deep breathing exercises with flinging hands loosely we athletes know how to, I looked to find just one or two known faces. Slowly, together we limped back to as far away as we could get from this madness for a purpose we still didn’t understand well or at least fathom the implications of for the long run. 

The student wings of the political parties and their comrades, however won many brownie points for the next college and university elections. 

Then the next few days we were taken all around town Delhi, starting with CP – Connaught Place. Where we were instructed to do all kinds of low paying jobs like stopping cars and cleaning them, just like the kids often do at signals, to polishing shoes of passers by and any conceivable ideas to demonstrate that soon enough we would not get any better jobs so we were starting to do what was considered as menial jobs. The conductors of these road dramas we participated in were the University seniors and political party youth wing leaders – in DU at the time any college’s senior could and would rag any fresher, especially from the North Campus. We did not have a way of telling who was a Senior and who was not. So we just quietly followed anyone who spoke authoritatively. Though we surely knew who ‘freshers’ were, as we would wear strange mismatched salwar sets, but much more from our demeanour. 

These innocent protests, theatric as they might seem, suddenly snowballed into self immolation bids and several were drawn into this frenzy and were badly burnt. Colleges were all shut in the city and all of DU asked to go home and stay away from the campus. As there was much agitation in every other street – with tyres being burnt and slogans being screamed and all of that constitutes aggressive student protests. But not vandalism anywhere close to what we saw in Dacca the last weeks. 

My mother, a long time college teacher, took no chance to ask me to come home by myself. As what was the guarantee I would, who knows whom I might be influenced by to stay back and fight the cause at hand. She traveled from Calcutta where she taught to bring me back home. I was at home in Calcutta for a few months till the agitation came to a halt, with the supreme court’s intervention and normalcy prevailed.

The thing I distinctly recall even from 1990,  was that it was all and all out, a students’ protest and agitation, and no public property or humans were attacked. No police were beaten up, at the most heckled. Self immolation, was the worst outcome of this Mandal Commission agitation, which was a very sad thing to happen. It was primarily this fear that imposed curfews and the shutting down of the university campus. 

That was contrasting to what happened for a similar cause, as in reservation, in Dacca in the last few weeks since June of 2024. 

So much of Bangladesh’s assets and properties were damaged, which in a poor country that was just limping into economic stability or let’s just say growth to begin with, is just outright criminal. The amount of destruction in terms of financial and workforce to cost of living to the country, of course the numerous innocent lives lost of many policemen, is definitely the plot and doing of mischief makers outside the government or protesting students I would have to conclude. 

Why would a party/government in power go about randomly shooting youth and imprisoning them, knowing that they would have to face the wrath and blame forever and thus never return to power. This mandate would require extreme stupidity to execute.

Also students, I would think, whose demands against the reservation quota were met could not be acting like the crooks and petty thieves we saw looting the ex PM’s house, shamefully picking on and displaying her saris, suitcases, food from her tables, worst being the underwear of a 76 year lady displayed from both arms on camera. If these agitations are touted to be the doings of students I am sorry for the pathetic state of affairs this nation will meet in the future.  

All this mayhem is definitely the mastermind of radical forces hell bent on making the government out to be so evil, they had to be amputated for the country to survive. But the worst fear in all this is that two strong forces – the government versus the students, both  were ignited by radicals, who will now perhaps rule the country, making Bangladesh not just dangerous to itself but to its neighbors and all around the world. 

Bangladesh has a history of radical elements hijacking important and pertinent issues like it once was about a language movement, Bengali, that turned into a religious bloodbath from which we are still reeling. The desire to speak one’s language, one’s mother tongue officially, does not amount to wanting to destroy every living person of another religion as was made out to be. 

India also had a language rebellion for long,  but it wasn’t hijacked by radical elements to become a weapon of mass destruction.  

Perhaps we don’t teach relevant history to the children and youth, so that they may become discerning students, to recognise what is real and what isn’t, which is the truth and which isn’t. This is, just as we don’t publish stories that create thinking citizens out of mass frenzy provoked youth. Personally I tend to find myself in the thick of a lot of controversial experiences as I don’t usually tread the beaten track. So that I may learn from new paths and write about them. 

I’m not saying it’s an easy task to create thinking individuals, in text books and marks/grade fearing nations, but it’s surely worth a try. 

This post is a continuation from my earlier post shared here again: https://www.facebook.com/share/1MtpPLr9MA6exwxC/?mibextid=WC7FNe

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