REPRESSION AGAINSTB PROTESTING STUDENT ILLEGITIMATE
Shahid Islam
Bangladesh is an uneven playing field for those seeking to survive and thrive under justice, equity and fair play. The brutal police attack on demonstrating students seeking reform to the existing quota system in selecting public servants is a vivid example of how the state willfully deprives talents to favour partisan candidates under a variety of pretexts; as it does in choosing public representatives to govern and lead the nation by derailing democracy through a slew of authoritarian mechanisms.
Image crisis
Now, only months before the next general election, the dictatorial governing mechanism is creating a serious image crisis at home and abroad for the incumbent regime and the nation alike.
Curiously, the style and the tactic to blunt any form of dissent are the same. In the summer of 2013, when thousands of students gathered at the University of Dhaka Campus demanding reform to the quota system, police used the same technique of repressions; as it did this week (on 9th April 2018).
Authentic media reports say police not only attacked with batons and tear gas the protesters and injured hundreds, they also raided the university dormitories that night and swooped on sleeping students with tear gas. And, like in the past, media was barred from broadcasting to the public what happened after the police raid.
But the social media did its part to tell the world what exactly happened. A number of global media reported on April 10 that “Bangladesh government has attacked the peaceful student protesters on April 9 with armed police and hired terrorists named as “Bangladesh Chatro League. More than 500 students have been injured. Government also ordered blackout and cut out supply in the university area.”
Constitutional invalidity
The movement of the aspiring public service students are lawful, and the system against which they have been fighting is an unconstitutional one that had survived for decades under the political patronage of successive regimes.
Under the existing system of choosing candidates for the Bangladesh Civil Service (BCS) cadre to lead public administrations, parts of the judiciary, and many other important government jobs,barely 45 percent candidates are recruited on merit while the remaining 55 percent are chosen on quotas that preserve a staggering 30 percent for freedom fighters’ children, 10 percent for women, 10 percent for district quotas, and 5 percent for tribal people.
Through this biased, unjust, faulty system, competitive, able and eligible candidates are deprived of deserved jobs and fulfilment of their desires to serve the nation as distinctive civil servants. No wonder the civil service of today is a mere skeleton of its former self in terms of merit, efficiency, eloquence, personality and leadership.
Antic executive order
This ‘whimsically-devised’ system came into effect through an executive order on September 5, 1972, during a constitutional interregnum and transition from Pakistan to newly independent Bangladesh. The new constitution that came into effect on December 16, 1972 enshrined the principle of non-discrimination in the public services; articles 27 and 28 stipulating that ‘there shall be no discrimination in the recruitment of the people to the public service irrespective of caste, religion and sex.’
As such, the antic provisional measures for proportional representation should have been scrapped long ago due to their biased allocation of 56% civil service appointments to the quota holders.
That aside, according to clause 1 of Article 29 of the amended constitution, “there shall be equality of opportunity for all citizens in respect of employment or office in service of the republic.” And, clause 2 of Article 29 states: “no citizen shall, on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth, be eligible for, or discriminated against in respect of, any employment or office in the service of the republic.” Based on such constitutional and legal guidelines, existing quota system is not only discriminatory, it’s blatantly unconstitutional.
The only defense such a discriminatory policy has in its favour is article 29(3) that ordains of “making special provision in favour of any backward section of citizens for the purpose of securing their adequate representation in the service of the republic.”
Bogus claims
Given that all pedigrees of freedom fighters, many of them carrying ‘false freedom fighter certificates’ of ancestors, are not ‘backward citizenry’ per se, the system is being misused to induct partisan loyalists and their children into vital services of the republic; violating enshrined constitutional rights of other deserving candidates.
For instance, in 2017, when the Liberation War Affairs Ministry was making a new list of freedom fighters, about 150,000 people applied to be included in the list of existing freedom fighters, who were later found to be fake. AKM Mozammel Haq, incumbent Liberation War Affairs Minister, said: “Not even five percent of them were freedom fighters (Prothom Alo, June 23, 2017). Moreover, irregularities in the process of listing freedom fighters are well documented, the list changing under every successive government.
There have also been allegations that members of the committee in charge of making the list often abused their power to include fake names in exchange for money, sometimes excluding real freedom fighters.
Bogus certificates
Bengali language daily The Prothom Alo reported on August 10, 2016 that “one former freedom fighter commander provided fake freedom fighters’ certificate to 19 people of his village in exchange for a large sum of money so that they could get jobs in the police force. More ominously, in 2014, five high-ranking government officials’ freedom fighters’ certificates were revoked because they had obtained the certificates using fake documents.
Who are those fake freedom fighters? Three of them were secretaries, one a joint secretary,and the other one none less than the chairman of the country’s Privatisation Commission. Moreover, thousands of vacant posts earmarked as ‘reserved for freedom fighters’ children’ cannot be replenished due to the 1972 executive order relating to the reserved quotas.
Audacious agro minister
Yet, the negotiations between the government and a 20 member delegates from the protesting students did yield a positive outcome on April 9 to defer the movement momentarily; only to be rekindled by the defamatory, libelous, insulting verbiage in the parliament of the quintessential bad-mouthed agriculture minister, Matia Chowdhury, who, along with some other ruling party leaders and lawmakers, termed the protesters as ‘Rajakars.’
The reaction from the protesters were erupting and instantaneous. Syed Zobaer Uddin, a representative of the protesters, who’s a Masters student at Dhaka University, said in front of the Raju Sculpture the same evening: “We are the children of Bangabandhu, not Rajakars, and we have no faith in the government that gives assurance of a month and then labels us as Rajakars,” and then, reneging on the promise they made to defer the movement for a month, they urged all to continue the movement until the PM herself assures them of a decision to reform the quota system and bury this illegitimate process of biased selection procedure that had deprived the nation for decades of the services of the most deserved and the talented leaders of tomorrow. And, due to this quota system of selection, the civil service today has in its rank and file a ‘politicized segment’ that is ignorant, arrogant and indecorous of the posts they hold.
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