Why must brute force always be the response to student protests?

July 16, 2024

DHAKA – At first it seemed the government was going to show the restraint expected from the state towards students protesting a quota system that needs a logical reform. Sadly, it did not take long for the government to take an unnecessarily hardline in an attempt to squash the spirit of these young people. What could have been resolved through a discussion as expected from any government, ended up being yet another violent suppression of the voices of students.

In an all too familiar sequence, when students on campuses throughout the country, spontaneously started protesting comments of the prime minister regarding their movement at a press conference on Sunday, members of the Chhatra League were ready and waiting to attack.

What followed was not something too surprising. Yet one cannot fail to be shocked at the brutality with which students, even women students, were beaten with rods and sticks. The images are hard to forget – students beaten unconscious, a student looking dazed as blood poured down his face, a capture of a man raising a stick just before it would hit two young women, a female student, unconscious, being taken to the hospital, young men with sticks and rods chasing students before hitting them mercilessly – these are not scenes from a battlefield but from campuses of universities. University campuses that resemble riot scenes. Student protesters who had gone to the emergency centre of Dhaka Medical College Hospital with their wounded fellow protesters were beaten up inside the hospital. Is this why young people go to universities – to either get beaten up or to be part of groups that do the beating?

Unfortunately, that is how students are divided on our campuses.

So why the show of