The
ongoing student protest has been against reckless driving, lawlessness
and corruption. However, the students, unbeknown to themselves, have
also been agitating against something less obvious : this is fatalism.
In this country, we believe most events are beyond our control. When a
person leaves her house, she says a silent or audible prayer, leaving
the relative safety of her home for a potentially dangerous world.
Indeed, this resignation is prevalent throughout South Asia, where
religion is the social, cultural and political force, and the state is
weak and inefficient, not just corrupt. No number of protests can alter
this fundamental attitude of the people. We just don't expect anything
from the state.
Our students have currently displayed what Rousseau called
compassion, or more strictly, pitie. It is what we feel when another
person suffers. We all have compassion until we are corrupted by
civilisation. Compassion is an admirable virtue, essentially human, but
it cannot take the place of regular government, however corrupt.
Recent
events on the campuses of universities in Bangladesh are eerily
redolent of similar events elsewhere in the world - namely, in China.
During the Cultural Revolution, students physically chastised teachers
and officials deemed not to hew strictly to the party line.
Add
to this the fact that if anyone queries the narrative of the ruling
party, he or she risks imprisonment.These events in Bangladesh suggest a
perceptible slide from mere authoritarianism (which has been normal in
Bangladesh) to degrees of totalitarianism The future seems bleak..
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