View from the Dhaka Tribune: The voices of Bangladeshi youth cannot be ignored any longer

It is at times like these that it becomes impossible to avoid the realisation that there is something very wrong not just in the body politic of Bangladesh but in the very fabric of our nation.

The one thing that we can all surely agree upon is that far too many people – and most heart-breakingly of all – far too many young people, including most shockingly and shamefully, mere children, have died.

There are many measures for the health of a country from GDP to social indicators to Gross National Happiness as has been pioneered by our near-neighbour Bhutan – but I would like to posit a simpler measure: a nation’s health can be measured by the ability of young boys and girls to be able to grow up to be young men and women and hopefully old men and women without having to fear for their life.

A nation which is forever burying its youth, which cannot keep them safe from the terrors that have been wrought on the student population of Bangladesh this past week, cannot be a nation which claims development and advancement.

No one questions that Bangladesh has made extraordinary advancements in the past half century since our independence. No one questions that we have a tremendous amount to be proud of when we look at the development that has been wrought – not just in terms of the economy but also in terms of measures such as health and education.

But all of the above achievements stand for naught if we are not able to provide our young men and women with simple safety and security to live their life.

And part of a life of safety and security is that you should be able to protest and express dissent without fear for your life or even for your physical safety.

Young men and women in Bangladesh do not have this right and the evidence is there for all to see.

At the time of writing, the death toll from the quota protests now runs into the scores and Dhaka city resembles a war zone, with streets littered with burned out vehicles and torched toll booths and pitched battles still raging in several quarters.

Things should never have come to such a pass and we all know exactly how and why they have done so.

The government tells us that the quota reform movement has been infiltrated by political trouble-makers and armed thugs looking for confrontation, and a quick review of many of the crowds that have taken control of key points in the city seems to bear this out, but that does not obscure the reality of how we got here in the first place.

The fact that the government believes that it is acceptable to unleash the fury and ferocity of the Chhatra League on student protesters tells us everything that is wrong with politics in this country. At a very basic level, this is not how a civilised country runs and we need to move beyond mob violence as an operating principle for governance.

There is no room for armed storm-troopers as a tool of statecraft in a democracy, and if you can’t run the country without recourse to them, then you need to ask yourself what exactly it is that you are running.

Now the capital is on fire and the violence has spread the length and breadth of the country, and to be perfectly blunt the government has no one to blame but itself. It may be true that at some point it has little option but to take stern measures in order to restore order – but at the same time, it is also true that the current conflagration is a fiasco entirely of its own making.

Could this sorry state of affairs have been avoided? Of course, it could have. All it would have taken was the authorities understanding that we are a democracy and that the Bangladeshi people – especially the young – need to be listened to and have their voices heard.

Bangladeshis ask for very little. But this is the one thing that we have always been unable to compromise on. You cannot rule Bangladeshis except with their consent and you try to silence them or ignore their concerns at your own peril.

This is the third decade of the 21st century. The time is long overdue for us to start listening – truly listening – to the concerns of the new generation of Bangladeshis born in this century or the last decade of the last millennium and to understand that they are unhappy with the direction the country is heading and that they both deserve and demand better.

We can be part of the solution or we can get out of the way. Because their time is coming. The future is now.

Zafar Sobhan is Editor, Dhaka Tribune.

This article first appeared in the Dhaka Tribune.