Aren’t we teaching violence, after all?

Violence in the Universities is becoming "dudh-bhaat". I apologise for the lack of equivalence of this Bangla expression, but such indeed is the case.

On Tuesday, the police dispersed almost 200 Jagannath University students, who, under the banner of "Progotishil Chhatra Jote" were protesting against the University's imposition of development fee.

Just a day back, the BUET administration faced agitation on the campus as a few Chhatra League activists, later expelled, beat up a 2006 batch student. Once again, 200 policemen were deployed in the campus while the students continued their protests for the third consecutive day.

At almost the same time, Khulna University of Engineering and Technology (KUET) was shut down indefinitely after Bangladesh Chhatra League activists had used lethal weapons, hammers, chains, bamboo sticks and brickbats to attack 25 students who were protesting about being served sub-standard food at an annual feast on the campus. In response, infuriated students attacked the VC's house and 5 teachers and a police officer were injured. Police was, once again deployed on the campus.

For God's sake, these are our children and for God's sake, this is our land!

While we engage in road marches with 3000 cars packed on the streets, while we witness elephants and horses being paraded in party meetings, while our senior politicians get beaten by the police while trying to demonstrate against the administration and while we actually see these same victims taking a full 180 degree and becoming perpetrators when in power, can we not, in our sane moments, remind ourselves that all we are teaching our children is violence and that the pages of our history will only be blotched with blood while our memory will be a melting pot of massacres?

When will our political parties (position and opposition) who regularly engage in mutual castigation realise that for a mere short-term benefit, they may instigate (not inspire) risings and revolutions as part of collective madness that may not be deemed as merely political events laying bare the legitimacy deficit that moves rational men and women to kill and die? Can the current collective movements that forms violent participation, truly be termed as the true representative of a civil society?

In our country, starting from street fights to genocide, including coordinated destruction, opportunism, brawls, individual aggression, scattered attacks: all count as collective violence. The incidents of violence occur on occasions where the political parties take to streets and where one Noor Hossain is sacrificed at the altar, in the name of justice and democracy. What the bickering political parties tend to forget is that they are subjecting the entire nation to a negative collective memory …

The French historian, Pierre Nora in 1989 wrote:
"Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution…History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer…"

There are lessons to be learnt from all across the globe. If we look at the early modern Europe, we discover a violent place that attracted scholars to form discourses on the concept of state formation. Across Europe, the protesters were usually made up of artisans, shopkeepers, and agriculteurs vulnerable to economic and fiscal oscillations. There were tax riots, grain riots, etc. Protests were all shared sentiments against the state having failed to uphold principles of traditional justice. These protests were never much of use as authorities preferred to let events run their course and then punish or execute a few people. However, the state in the meantime intervened preemptively. This is how civilising in Europe had begun. This is how Europe studied the rioters' identity, the motifs of political violence, and the issues and conditions that could transform lingering discontent into violent and avoided mass hysteria like the "sans-culotte" movements of their past.

Bangladesh at 41, cannot afford to have memories of mass hysteria, "new liberation wars", new discourses on revised formats of democracy and daily engagement in violence. Bangladesh, at 41, does not want to witness its children getting murdered and dumped in bins, beaten in campuses, threatened in the name of political ideology. Bangladesh, at 41, needs to be fearless and free from violence.

It's most definitely time for us to re-engage in the study of foundation of civil societies, examining programs, marches, riots, and other forms of collective political phenomena that indicate deep-seated conflicts in the society. At the same time, responsible members of the civil society must also kindly devise a model of conflict resolution based on the recognition of memories of violence while promoting new institutional arrangements to form a non-violent core of our land.

At 41, is it really too much for Bangladesh to ask this of us all?

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Rubana Huq, Managing Director, Mohammadi Group.