THE attack that the Chhatra League, the student wing of the ruling Awami League, carried out on Tuesday on groups of students, mainly comprising left-leaning organisations, who held protests against the scheduled visit of India’s prime minister Narendra Modi near the Teacher-Student Centre on the campus of the University of Dhaka is worrying on a few counts. The attack that the Chhatra League carried out with bricks and sticks in the afternoon on the student protests left 20 injured, who had to be sent to hospital for treatment. The Chhatra League also snatched away an effigy of Narendra Modi from members of a left-leaning student organisation. The students in question were holding protests against the Indian prime minister’s March 26–27 visit to Bangladesh because of Narendra Modi’s extreme anti-Muslim religious communalism and progrom in Gujarat, the high-handedness of India, led by Modi, in the form of unabated death of Bangladeshis in the hands of India’s border guards, bilateral issues that are in Bangladesh’s interests left unresolved by India, India’s use of national register of citizens in Assam purporting pressure on Bangladesh and India’s having had almost everything in its own interest by arm-twisting Bangladesh. In view of all this, the protests against India’s prime minister are just and democratic, the kind of which is widely in practice across the world.
While the protests in question against Modi’s visit born out of widespread resentment at India’s having done all this are justified, the government of the day should rather, and had better, side by side reviewing its subservient foreign policy towards India, use the protests as a device to mount pressure on India for the settlement of all issues that are in Bangladesh’s interests — the most prickly among them, in addition to the issue of death of Bangladeshis in the frontiers, are agreements on the sharing of the water of common rivers, trade- and export-import related issues that off and on adversely impact Bangladesh’s domestic market, the issues of transit and transshipment, land border problems and the issues of fencing along the border in violation of the international law, etc. Instead of using such protests as a device to mount pressure on India for the settlement of unresolved issues — the like of which is also noticed across the world — the student wing of the ruling Awami League dastardly attacked the student protesters in a manner the like of which may be a reality in India in cases of Modi being opposed and the wings of the Bharatiya Janata Party attacking the protesters. Such an attack also reeks of a tacit approval of people high up in the ruling party structure.
The ruling party must, therefore, stop using its student or other wings to foil protests held in a democratic manner against issues that run counter to Bangladesh’s interests. It needs to do some soul-searching and review its foreign policy in order for it to use such protests and dissents in the country’s interests. The government must also set about a credible investigation of the incident in question and hold to account everyone who attacked the students peacefully protesting at Narendra Modi’s visit.
