Of dormitories and schools
From university dormitory to school.Photo: STAR
YOU cannot, you must not disagree with the students of Jagannath University. They have been demonstrating on the roads, they have been getting clubbed by the police and they have been hauled away to prison. As with all young men and women worried about their future, as also the future of education, they have tried to uphold a cause. It is a proper cause, a right cause. They have only been asking that the twelve dormitories of the university, under unlawful and therefore immoral occupation by unscrupulous people, be returned to the university. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the cause. It is a principle that all citizens, holding fealty to law and decency, cannot but embrace as their own. And then they should do more. As individuals and as a collective body of people, it now devolves on all of us to demand an explanation for all the sordid things that have been done over the years in the matter of the Jagannath University dormitories. Politicians have not held themselves back from occupying the dormitories and setting up their own business establishments there. It is criminality of this kind that must now be made to face justice. Do not take away those young protesters to jail. Look for these politicians (and it does not matter which party they belong to) and haul them away to the courts of justice. That done, go to the city mayor's office and ask Sadek Hossain Khoka why his office has played an equally sinister role in appropriating to itself a swathe of property that is properly the university's. He has spoken of a return of that property to Jagannath University if that is the kind of solution arrived at. He misses the point; or he thinks we will be happy with his explanation. As the man running the show at Dhaka City Corporation, he owes us all an explanation: on what moral grounds did the corporation take control of those university dormitories? It is corruption we are speaking of. And if Hasan Mashhud Chowdhury means business, the Anti-Corruption Commission should be going swiftly and ruthlessly after anyone and everyone who has been involved in the crime of laying claim to the dormitories. There are the corrupt policemen who have gleefully taken over some of the dormitories and turned them into living quarters for their families. These policemen should be publicly identified and made to answer for what is truly a crime of land grabbing. Meanwhile, have their families move out of those dormitories as fast as you possibly can. There are scores of young students waiting out there, those who need to stay in those dormitories. Keep watch on those unruly elements of the Chhatra Dal and Chhatra League who have also savoured their own pieces of the dormitory pie down the years. The cause of the Jagannath students is, therefore, the cause of a nation. You will be doing grave damage to national self-esteem if you punish these young for the values they have been trying to uphold. Go after those transgressors of the law, take off their masks in public, and convince us that it is possible for us to reclaim the country. And reclaiming is also something you can do in Chittagong, through lending your voice and your weight to the struggle to save two old, reputed schools from falling prey to crass commercialism. Mayor Mohiuddin Chowdhury is determined to demolish those schools, build a business complex there (within which the schools will be built anew!!) and so give people an idea of the prosperity the city he presides over can bring forth and the revenues that will pour into the national coffers. In an era where globalisation is all, where business education has been pushing liberal arts to the abyss, this stubborn search for money is understandable. But must that come at a price? You think nothing of history; you make a mockery of heritage when you think of two old schools as just dilapidated, out-of-touch buildings. Tradition, in case some of us have missed out on the idea, is the claim of a people on their past. Ask Binod Bihari Chowdhury. Nearly a centenarian, he has hauled himself out of his home, indeed out of a revolutionary past we have consistently taken pride in, to demand that the mayor rescind his plans of sending the schools into oblivion. Other men and women, all individuals who see life as something a little more profound than a shopping complex, have rallied behind the schools, behind Binod Bihari Chowdhury, behind Begum Mushtari Shafi, to demand that unabashed materialism be kept at bay, that history not go through the bulldozers the Chittagong City Corporation is these days sorely tempted to bring into play. If the Jagannath University dormitories are not returned to their owners, if the Chittagong schools bite the dust, the consequential shame will be ours. O, what sad lives we lead!
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