Shaping Bangladesh’s second liberation with students

Hafizur Molla, the son of an auto-rickshaw driver from Faridpur, came to study at the University of Dhaka in January 2016. A month later, he was laid down in his grave.

Hafizur is one of the hundreds of victims of Awami League’s student wing Chhatra League’s reign of terror that sustained over 15 years in almost all universities in Bangladesh. Their free rein in the campuses was sanctioned by the highest level of the government to preempt any student-led movements.

Till July 2024, all the student dormitories in Bangladeshi universities were controlled by the ruling party's student wing. To find a place in these dormitories, popularly known as halls, freshmen from underprivileged backgrounds at every university had no other option but to abide by the rules set by the BCL. One of the thumb rules was to attend ‘guest rooms’ and do whatever BCL leaders asked them to do at midnight.

Hafizur, like his peers, had to attend political programs at midnight in the chilling winter and sleep on the balcony of SM Hall in early 2016. This turned deadly soon as he caught pneumonia and died.

On August 5th, 2024, when Sheikh Hasina resigned and fled, the campuses controlled by her loyal BCL cadres were finally liberated. Demands for reforms rose on the campuses to keep the fascist tendencies at bay.

Now that the students have achieved liberation, it is time to consider the pathways to cementing their gains and ensuring that student politics delivers positive changes. In the early hours of this new dawn, I am tempted to offer a few simple and actionable suggestions for the future of student politics.

Functional students’ union is a must

Student unions at every university must be kept functional, and periodic elections should be held. Students can decide the tenure of their representatives, but they need to be democratically elected.

As we observed in the last DUCSU election, the fairness of the voting process is one challenge that needs to be addressed. Online voting is a possible solution to this. If students were capable of creating their own networks to communicate digitally during an internet blackout, they could be trusted to build a transparent and trustworthy online system.

I was elected as an officer at the University of Sussex Students Union through online voting. The process was pretty simple. To vote for the candidate of their choice, students had to log in to the union's election portal with their institutional email. By evening, we got the results and the new committee.

To ensure a fair election and prevent grouping, we were barred from forming panels and had to participate individually. Forming panels was illegal, and if someone was found creating a panel with others, it could have cost them their candidacy.

Each candidate had to submit their manifesto in the portal to nominate himself/herself for the available posts before the deadline, and they were made available to the public for greater transparency. Even after winning the polls, our profiles on the union’s website had our manifestos attached so that we were always mindful of our responsibilities.

Keep dormitories out of politics

Since most Bangladeshi public universities aren’t residential any more, students’ unions should move out of the decade-old dormitory-based electoral system. Instead, separate elections can be held at the different faculties, and two members of the faculty committees can be sent to represent the faculty at the central students’ union’s town hall meeting.

The university authority — the provosts, house tutors and other staff — should manage the dormitories, from allocating rooms to supervising the canteen. They should make themselves available to the students and play their role in addressing the problems in the halls.

Political activities, banners, and promotional materials should stay out of the dormitories. No student group would be allowed to form hall-based committees, as well.

The loss of the incentive to control the halls will decrease their violent political activities significantly.

On party-affiliated student politics on campus

The students should reach a consensus on whether they will allow party-affiliated student politics on the campuses. Regardless, their activities need to be restricted even if they continue to operate on the campuses.

However, political parties and educational institutions can amicably solve this problem.

Party-affiliated student groups can organise events at their respective party’s office or other places beyond the campuses, where students can join and share their insights so that the parties understand the pulse of students and accommodate their demands. They can have union, upazila, district and central committees instead of university or college-based committees.

Members of the party-affiliated student groups can participate in the students’ union elections with full disclosure of their affiliation, but they must resign from their respective organisations if they are elected to the position.

The political parties should embrace the new reality and learn from the BCL. For 15 years, they controlled the halls and recruited activists and leaders from there, but when the movement reached a critical mass, it took mere hours for them to be banished from the universities. In some cases, the humiliation was paramount to the movement’s eventual success in ousting Hasina.

A new dawn?

With Hasina’s resounding fall, her house of cards, where her party’s student cadres served as a pillar, collapsed.

By now, we all know controlling campuses never yields any fruit in the long run. On the other hand, parties might forever lose votes for the violence perpetrated by their student groups.

Mobilising large crowds for rallies should be removed from the parameters used by all political parties to judge student leaders' success. Instead, mobilising votes to serve the student body should be their prime concern, which can be achieved by offering pragmatic and pro-student policies.

Student politics is the beacon of our new hope. Political parties need to realise that instead of using student politics as a tool to win elections and recruit political cadres, it should be an integral part of future nation-building efforts. The July Revolution proved that the established way in which student politics operated along party lines was destructive. It was defeated by a more democratic, politically non-partisan brand of student politics. Learning that lesson holds the key to a constructive and positive future for student politics and, through it, Bangladesh.●

Aaqib Md Shatil is a researcher and a contributor to Netra News.