“Either hold the DUCSU, RUCSU, JUCSU and JnUCSU elections, or choose the way out of power on your own responsibility. One or the other has to be done. You will destroy students’ right to vote, take away democratic rights, and then speak of democracy in parliament: we will not accept that.”
SM Farhad, general secretary of the Dhaka University Central Students’ Union (DUCSU), said this at 10pm on Saturday at a street rally at the main gate of Islamic University (IU) during the 11-party alliance’s Dhaka-Khulna-Jhenaidah-Kushtia long march.
On the election schedules not being announced after the student unions’ terms ended, he said: “The terms of DUCSU, RUCSU, JUCSU and JnUCSU have ended, but no schedule is being given. Because they know their extortionist force, their guard force, will lose badly in this election as before. So the students of Islamic University must commit that, whoever is or is not in power, the Islamic University students’ union election must be held.”
On government recruitment, he said the government had failed in the first few stages of the process it had begun to appoint party loyalists. “In the latest BCS, there was an attempt to drop a large number of students. But when CUCSU, JUCSU, DUCSU and RUCSU took to the streets, they were forced to back down. Now they are scheming over how to appoint party people there through various curricula.”
“All students of Islamic University must decide that the students’ union election here has to be held,” he said. “After coming to power in 1990, the BNP held no students’ union election in Bangladesh for five years. Why not? Because they fear students’ votes. They fear the votes of the educated, they fear the votes of the young generation.”
Present were DUCSU vice-president Abu Sadik Kayem; Ibrahim Hossain Rony, vice-president of the Chittagong University Central Students’ Union (CUCSU); Syed Joynul Abedin, MP for Dhaka-4; Advocate Masud Parvez Russell, MP for Chuadanga-1; Abu Musa, a former president at Islamic University; Yusuf Ali and Rashedul Islam Rafi, president and general secretary of the Islami Chhatra Shibir’s Islamic University unit; and leaders and activists at various levels.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report