Editorial
World Cup there and violence here
How can BUET students behave in such scandalous manner?
THE on-going World Cup in South Africa has caused, improbably, an indefinite closure of a university here in Bangladesh. The authorities of the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) were compelled by circumstances to shut down the institution for an indefinite length of time only because a group of unruly students wanted classes to be suspended from June 19. The reason for such behaviour was the World Cup which the students wanted to watch at leisure. For their part, the university authorities decided that classes would be suspended from June 26.
That should have been the end of the matter. It was not, for then some students, all of them at the junior level, took matters into their own hands by shutting the main gate of the university and compelling other students to stay away from classes as a way of putting pressure on the authorities. In no time, some senior students intervened, the inevitable result being a violent clash between those determined to keep the gate shut and those wishing to have it opened. Five students were left badly injured. In the event, it was a hapless university administration that moved to suspend classes and order students to leave their residential halls. It is at this point that our sense of outrage arises. When a simple game of football played out on a global scale can lead to impetuosity among youth here, we are left wondering at what could be going wrong with our young people. The BUET incident is not the only instance of Bangladeshis squabbling over the World Cup. Similar incidents have been reported from other places as well. One could now well ask the question: why must the young, especially students, get so worked up as to engage in such swift over reactive demonstrations?
The question above is not confined to football related incidents alone. Almost everywhere --- on the streets, at industrial installations, at political rallies, in public vehicles, on television talk shows --- there seems to be a readiness on the part of people to abjure reason for self-defeating sentimentality on the flimsiest of pretexts. Conversation is no more the art it used to be or should have been. It has, in a number of instances, been replaced by hectoring and haranguing. Tempers fly, epithets are hurled and limbs are attacked where decent talking ought to have been. How does one explain such a steep fall in patience and decency? Suffice it to say that the old values, upheld by earlier generations, have systematically crumbled; and polite behaviour has made way for roguish acts.
It is time for all of us, political classes as well as civil society, to make a good assessment of the situation. Poverty forces people into strange behaviour, of course. So does an absence of enlightened leadership, at all levels. That, however, is no reason for the BUET students to behave as they did on Saturday. We disapprove of such behaviour on their part.
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