National Citizen Party (NCP) chief coordinator Nasiruddin Patwary said students had not taken to the streets demanding auto-pass or exam cancellation, but so that they would not have to swim through floods, waterlogging and severe hardship to reach exam centres, and would not be “guinea pigs” for repeatedly changed, experimental exam systems. “It is a reasonable, humane and just movement,” he said in a Facebook post on Saturday (18 July).
He said students had not gone to the streets to bring down the government, yet some political and social figures were trying to give the movement a political colour with irresponsible remarks, creating an atmosphere of attacks, arrests, harassment and fear against students. According to various students’ complaints, he said, they were being contacted on their phones and threatened by people identifying themselves as detective police (DB); if true, this was deeply worrying and shameful for a democratic state. He called on the government to immediately stop intimidating students, threatening arrest and harassing them, saying problems could be solved through dialogue, not force, and urging the government to sit with students, hear them and quickly resolve their reasonable grievances.
Patwary said it must be remembered that students are not terrorists, and that harassing them socially and humanely with various political tags simply for expressing dissent cannot be the mark of a civilised state. He urged the government to choose restraint, dialogue and solutions, warning that otherwise a solvable crisis could needlessly turn into major social unrest, and said that in a democracy a citizen’s advice should be treated as part of responsible governance rather than labelled “incitement” or “political conspiracy.”
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report