When students are the poets of the streets
“Poetry is in the streets!” When the incessant thrust of the student movement shook the state, the students had scrawled this slogan all over the walls of Paris, back in 1968. They wanted to smash the old world to pieces. They felt the old world stood as a barricade, blocking their way forward. The students wrote, “The barricade blocks the street, but opens the way.”
They wanted to destroy the old world, thirsting for a brand new world. A quote of the revolutionary Russian thinker Mikhail Bakunin was very popular among them – “The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.” The students were infused with emotion. They wrote poetry on the streets, with the flames of their dreams, in revolutionary letters of the alphabet.
In July-August this year, we saw the same whirl of history on the streets of Bangladesh. It was with their very lives that the students wrote the poetry of the movement on the streets. Thousands and thousands took to the streets in their dream for freedom. They confronted the government with indomitable courage. With innovative ideas and strategies they gave life to the movement. And finally they toppled the ironclad government.
This story was not as easy as telling it in just four or five lines. In the over 15 years of her rule, the fallen prime minister had not only become a hardened autocrat, but became a cruel repressor too. She suppressed all opposition parties with relentless cruelty, destroyed all institutions of the state, used repressive laws and extrajudicial means to stifle the voice of the media.
Sheikh Hasina’s cruelty went to all extremes during this movement. She unleashed her political party and groups as well as certain forces in a killing spree against the people of this very state. The preparation for this killing was unimaginable, exactly like a state war against the enemy. Sheikh Hasina had tucked the state and government into her party’s pocket like a handkerchief.
The students of Bangladesh displayed incredible courage and refused to bend. They first stood up against the unjustified quota system in government jobs. But Hasina’s arrogance created the stage for the demand of a small group to billow into a people’s movement. With their astute and ingenious programmes, the students succeeded to draw in people of all classes, professions, groups and ages. Everyone fearlessly bared their chests before the government’s cruel killing machine. When the people stand as a united political force that rejects the government, who can thwart them? The rest is history.
The bold uprising of students has taken place again and again in the history of Bangladesh. This matter calls for detailed research. One must draw a remarkable comparison between the social characteristics of West Bengal and East Bengal in this regard. In the 19th century, after a middle class emerged in Kolkata, the centre of West Bengal, many charismatic personalities emerged like Ram Mohan Roy, Bankim Chandra Chattapadhaya, Bhudeb Mukhapadhaya, Iswarchadra Bidya Sagar, Vivekananda and so on. They each represented different philosophies or ideas of reform. They are part of West Bengal’s repeated changes in social history and essence of thought. The conscious society there imbibed the new narratives brought forth by these wise men, and this brought about changes in the society along with the changing times.
The history of East Bengal or Bangladesh is a startling exception. Here it is the public, the people, that are main, not any individual. One may look to 1952, 1969, 1971, 1990 and lastly, 2024 as examples. In this moment of history, it is the power of the people that mattered, rather than any individual. It is the people that have risen up in every shining chapter of Bangladesh’s history. More importantly, the people’s movement had brought about radical changes in the state, the society and the greater system of things. And the first spark of these movements has always been ignited by the students. They have become the first drivers of the movements.
There were reasons behind their success. Their language appealed to the youth, their narrative drew in people from all walks of life, their strategy kept the movement alive
The people arose along with the students, changing history. Yet we have relegated those incidents to memoirs and general history. We actually have never really analysed the substance of those chapters of history in context of Bangladesh’s social history and the morphing present. That is why the substance of our history escapes us time and again.
The question is, why is it the students that become the centre of the critical junctures in the state?
The world is in motion. The world in which the older generation grows, goes ahead of them. It is the youth that first capture the pulse of the new interactions and demands that emerge in life. It is not possible to attain those new elements without destroying the old. The elderly are used to the old world and look forward to an unchanged existence. The youth carry no baggage, they throw caution to the winds, their thirst for a new world makes them dauntless. When they are forbidden at every step, they can state, “It is forbidden to forbid,” just as the students of Paris movement asserted.
The relationship between students and public is amazing. Any student is the embodiment of a parent's future expectations. The relationship between parents and students-offspring is one of pure emotion and dreams. The relationship between students and the public is just an extension of this. When young ones jump into a movement for any justified demands, the public lends their benevolent support, just as we saw in the instance of the safe roads movement.
Another dimension to this relationship can be extracted from the 1952 language movement. The middle class of East Pakistan back then began to gain good shape with the money from the back-breaking labour of the jute cultivators. Their children would come to study at Dhaka University. When these students took up the movement for Bangla to be one a state language, the sardars and people of Old Dhaka did not support them initially. But when bullets pierced the chests of the students, then they lent their full support and joined hands with them. The young ones can make mistakes, but does that mean they will be shot? Had they not invested their own lives in these students?
The transformation in ideology and development of these students before and after independence was remarkable. Generally speaking all sorts of students took part in the 1952 language movement. But the students of the left socialist inclination were directly and indirectly in the lead.
Those were the days of the Cold War. The anxiety was clear in the declassified documents of the US. It was students of the left democratic orientation that took up the flag of the movement -- the education movement in 1962 and the mass uprising in 1969. They managed to involve the people. The picture changed at the end of the eighties with the fall of the socialist world. The leftist camp lost its shine in Bangladesh. It was the mainstream political parties' student fronts that played a direct role in the 1990 movement to topple General Ershad's military autocracy.
This time it was quite different. The mainstream student organisations failed to play a tangible role. The movement was spontaneous. But certain politically ambitious culturally involved students played a vital role behind the scenes of this movement. There were reasons behind their success. Their language appealed to the youth, their narrative drew in people from all walks of life, their strategy kept the movement alive against the state forces and conspiracies.
Any uprising has two phases. One is the fall, the other is the rise. The former is the exit of the old, the latter is the rise of the new. The first is incredibly difficult, the second is even more so. How there will be a rise of the new, or even if the new will rise up at all, depends on the maturity of the people that have arisen as a political entity.
However, no matter what direction this rise or structuring takes, the fall that took place in this movement of 2024 has been successful and can certainly be a part of history.
The students are major shareholders in this success. Hats off to them.
Dhaka, 30 October 2024
* Sajjad Sharif is a poet and the executive editor of Prothom Alo