The Jatiyatabadi Chhatra Dal has condemned and protested the display of a 1948 photo of Muhammad Ali Jinnah at the Dhaka University Central Students’ Union (DUCSU) museum.
The organisation’s president, Rakibul Islam, and general secretary, Nasir Uddin Nasir, issued the condemnation and protest in a statement on Monday.
They noted that on March 21, 1948, standing at the then Racecourse Ground, Muhammad Ali Jinnah declared that “Urdu, and Urdu alone” would be Pakistan’s state language. The fearless student community of Dhaka University at the time immediately raised its voice in protest against Jinnah’s blatantly arrogant remarks, which later laid the foundation for our bloody language movement and the great Liberation War. Displaying a photo of that controversial leader at the museum of a students’ union that was the birthplace of Bengal’s self-determination movement, they said, is a direct insult to the legacy of the language and independence movements.
Chhatra Dal alleged: “The current DUCSU leadership has completely failed to resolve ordinary students’ housing crisis, secure their essential rights, and create a proper academic environment. Disregarding students’ legitimate interests, they have turned the union into a tool for implementing their own specific party and ideological agenda. From the despicable attempt to rename Madhur Canteen as ‘Ishrat Manzil’ to installing Jinnah’s controversial photo at the DUCSU museum — this pattern of actions proves that this Shibir-controlled DUCSU council has abandoned students’ collective aspirations and the university’s spirit of liberation, instead betraying its covert affinity for the defeated forces of 1971 and its love for Pakistan.”
In the statement, Chhatra Dal’s president and general secretary said the photo of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who opposed the Bangla language, must be immediately removed from the DUCSU museum. DUCSU must not be used as a venue for any specific political group to practise its ideology, they said, adding that they would resist all attempts to distort the historic Madhur Canteen and every other historical marker and spirit of Dhaka University.