Dhaka University: Who Runs This Place?

Dhaka University: Who Runs This Place?

- Shayan S. Khan

The movement for quota reform may have riveted the street, but it was always meant to end indoors. For the best possible outcome to be realized, the thrill of protests would inevitably have to give way to the tedium of paperwork. It may be noted that the protestors themselves could never put forward a proposed new quota regime, one that reflected the reforms they had in mind. Truth be told, the ones best-equipped for that task would be experienced civil servants and bureaucrats who have spent enough years within the public administration system to be well-versed in its complexities. It is simply the nature of the beast.

The quota reform movement deserves enormous credit, and not a little gratitude on behalf of the rest of society, for having forced one of its veritable “Golden Cows” - issues seemingly beyond question, even though on closer scrutiny we find any number of such questions may be raised. The issue of quotas in Bangladesh’s public sector recruitment clearly was one, and it may well have been the most impenetrable, given the sheer enormity and complexity in refixing the allotments on a fairer basis, preferably one that reflects some of the realities that have come to manifest over the best part of the last half-century.

Yet the climatic last week of the protests, in particular the incidents starting April 8 and leading up to the prime minister’s pledge on the floor of parliament to abolish quotas altogether (although one should avoid reading too much into that) on April 11, and continued through the aftermath brought some disturbing elements into view that cannot be washed away in the euphoria of the movement’s positive outcome.

To many observers, the most troubling of all these elements by some distance is the role being played by ruling party Awami League’s student front, the Bangladesh Chhatra League (BCL) at the country’s premier seat of higher learning, Dhaka University.