After the brutal murder of Abrar by the ruling party’s vigilante terror group BCL, the administration at Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) showed an iota of spine and banned party-linked politics on campus. Given that BCL is a terror organization like Iran’s Basij whose main task is to use murder, rape, and mayhem to terrorize regime opponents extra-judicially, this has not sat well with the ruling junta since historically university campuses had been a focal point of oppositional politics in Bangladesh. Hence the constant attacks on the general students by the BCL.
After the ascent of the current one-party, one-family dictatorship in 2009, the regime wanted to take no chances with dissent on campuses and armed BCL (ostensibly a ‘student’ organization but in reality, made up of 30-, 40-, and 50- something thugs) with firearms and provided it with legal impunity to unleash terror across every public university in the country. The result has been that no non-BCL organizational presence exists anymore in Bangladesh’s once vibrant and pluralistic universities; the appointment of teachers and deans is controlled by BCL leaders; marking of exams, granting of diplomas, and allotment of residence halls seats is similarly subject to the whims of the campus- or central BCL leadership. Because universities are technically ‘autonomous’, the regime gets the benefit of brushing off such cruelty and crime as outside its jurisdiction while making sure that only its own sycophants are appointed as university CEOs (known as vice chancellors). The few newspapers who dare to write about such happenings directly often find their reporters kidnapped, beaten up, or simply disappeared; most mainstream newspapers, like the Daily Observer and Dhaka Tribune, are controlled by regime aligned businesses to do much beyond the typical tsk tsk of impotent clowns with the show of a phony conscience.
Bangladesh’s public universities—their faculty appointments, dorm assignments, course assessments, examination grading– are controlled by a terror organization; no respectable college or university in the West should accept the degrees or transcripts issued by Bangladeshi universities or colleges at face value.