Are we letting down the martyrs of July-August?
There was euphoria on the streets on 5 August with every street and alleyway of Dhaka turning into a human sea. Brave souls who came out on the streets risking their lives in the morning of that gory day and the common people who were suppressed for years came out in droves after the fall of Awami League government, clogged every other inch of the megacity.
I was no exception as I joined the jubilant crowds in the afternoon to see firsthand the outcome of sleepless nights in the last fortnight. I went to Bijoy Sarani around 5:00pm where a massive sculpture of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was being smashed and torn down. That was pandemonium. I glued my eyes to the top of the gigantic sculpture inaugurated some odd nine months ago by then prime minister Sheikh Hasina.
Suddenly I heard a commotion nearby. As inquisitive as I was, I looked for the source and found that a guy in his 30s was being manhandled. I went nearer to find that some enraged youths had already started beating up that lanky youth accusing him of being a Chhatra League (student wing of Awami League) man. At least two persons were trying to save him. A punch was aimed at his nose and the aim was perfect. Bloods came gushing out from his mouth. Without a second thought, I instantly slipped into the mob and joined those who were trying to calm the mob down and started beseeching the attackers to spare the hapless guy.
The attackers were not much in number but they were rabid. I even heard one of them accusing the victim to be someone who was among the goons who attacked the students and masses mercilessly just the previous day. I didn’t relent and even received some punches aimed at that guy. Soon some other guys—some youths with national flags tied in their heads and one elderly man with a red beard—joined us and finally we convinced the attackers to leave that guy alone. Some of the saviours took him to a safer place, leaving me wondering about an imminent danger, a dangerous threat of taking law into one’s own hands.
Extrajudicial killing of anyone, even if the person is a proven criminal, is barbaric and cannot be condoned in any civilized society. Watching up close and first hand this mob beating was set serious alarm bells ringing for me as it harbingered some more incidents of this sort in coming days.
Minutes after swallowing the incident, a different perspective evolved in my mind. Had that guy been involved with attacking these very youths the previous day, would he ever dare to come to this place at that very moment? What if the accusations were blatant lies, that someone from the crowd pointed a finger at him out of any previous enmity? If that was really the case, then none is safe from any such mob. One just needs to instigate a crowd, accusing anyone at his will of being a cadre or complicit with the deposed government and rest will be taken care of!
Back in 2019 we witnessed single mother Taslima Begum Renu being beaten dead in the capital’s Badda, falsely accused of being a child kidnapper. We saw incidents of mob lynching in false accusations in our neighboring countries. What if a culture of mob lynching in name of punishing all wrongdoings of the deposed autocrats springs up in our country? That thought gnawed at my core of psyche for rest of that historic day of 5 August.
Personally, 5 August was not my first experience of diving into an incensed mob to save a person. I had a similar experience back on 10 September in 2012. A delegation of BNP’s student wing Jatiyatabadi Chhatra Dal had an appointment to pay a courtesy call on the vice chancellor on the day. But the ruling party student wing Bangladesh Chhatra League men, who had the unquestionable monopoly on the campuses, were bent on not allowing JCD men enter the campus to say 'hello' to the administration.
Before the JCD leaders could even enter the campus to meet the VC, they were chased and beaten mercilessly. This was all happening before our very eyes since we campus reporters were assigned to cover the incident. Seeing a JCD man pinned to the ground while some 7-8 BCL men were assaulting him, we three journalists approached the attackers and rescued the victim. I can remember, when I showed the attackers my identity card, one of them aggressively quipped "Areh rakh tor journalist, amar naam ta potrikae likhish!" ("So what if you are a journo? Write my name in your newspaper!") Without an iota of shame about beating a fellow student, he was actually asking me to name him as the attacker in my newspaper as if it was a ‘badge of honour’, as if it was a ‘character certificate’ for him.
The 5 August student-mass uprising ushered in many hopes, with one of foremost being that our universities would break free from the long-standing culture of torture and one-group domination in name of student politics that led to incidents such as harrowing killing of Abrar Fahad in BUET campus by BCL men in 2019. We envisaged a campus where not a single student would be assaulted for expressing dissent, that our campuses would become a confluence of ideas and ideals.
Has that dream started to dissipate within just one and half months of the Pyrrhic victory the students achieved on 5 August? Are we plunging into the same old cannibalism? The apprehension is a real one if we look at three recent incidents that took place in three out of four oldest universities in Bangladesh—first in Rajshahi University, then in Jahangirnagar University and Dhaka University on 18 September.
Abdullah Al Masud, a former leader of BCL’s Rajshahi University unit was beaten to death near the campus on 8 September. A post on Awami League's verified Facebook page alleged that cadres of Bangladesh Islami Chhatra Shibir (Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami student wing) beat him dead on the fateful day. It also accused Shibir men of cutting tendons of Masud back in 2014. Videos of Masud, who had a five-day-old child, lying on the floor of a police station and pleading for a sip of water, would unsettle any person with minimum conscience.
Yesterday, Shamim Ahmed, an ex-leader of Jahangirnagar University unit of BCL was caught outside the campus, beaten in phases by groups, on allegation that he was involved with attacking students on behalf of the ruling party on 15 July. He could not survive the attack.
JU authorities have expelled eight students of the university over the killing of Shamim. Three of them are reportedly JCD activists and one a coordinator of Students Against Discrimination's JU unit.
On the same night, some students of Fazlul Haque Hall at Dhaka University beat a certain Tofazzal to death inside the hall suspecting him to be a thief. The man was reportedly ‘mentally unstable’ and used to loiter around the campus. The DU students involved in the killing can at least brag themselves to be humane as a picture of feeding the man in the hall's dining room before his death went viral on social media! What a tragic recreation of ‘The Last Supper’!
These three killings in three premier universities of the country, many reprisal attacks on the men of previous government, killing of a Swecchasebak Dal leader in Gopalganj on 14 September, death of a Jubo Dal leader after being detained during a joint forces operation in Mymensingh city on 16 September, all augur a grim future for us.
Do these incidents herald a plunging into further darkness? If that is so, the souls of hundreds of valiant people killed during July-August mass uprising will curse us for letting down the spirit for which they laid their lives for so unhesitatingly. The American social reformist Barbara Deming's words seem more that applicable to our predicament today: "Vengeance is not the point; change is. But the trouble is that in most people's minds the thought of victory and the thought of punishing the enemy coincide."
Can we really carry out any meaningful reforms if such madness goes unpunished?