When students are the poets of the streets

 

Students demonstrate in Dhaka as they join the quota reform movement.

“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.