THE saying ‘a bad apple spoils the whole barrel’ perhaps applies to any group of people. This means that, in certain circumstances, it takes only one or a few elements to ruin the reputation of an entire community.

For a long time, the behaviour and actions of students in our country were not very glorious. As a result, the dignity of the entire student population reached the nadir of decline. Students were synonymous with hooligans in some aspects of social life. People dreaded their presence and feared impending harm from them.

All these were caused by a tiny section of students who were affiliated with certain political parties. They abused their identity as students and their political linkages to flex their muscles and to harass others at campuses and beyond. The image of students thus tarnished the reputation of the student population as a whole, especially during Sheikh Hasina’s fifteen-and-half-year autocratic rule.

However, the misdemeanour of a section of students should not make us believe that the rest of them were the same.

Our students did an amazing job in July and early August in 2024. They stood firm against shootings and maimings of young people by Hasina’s security forces. Hundreds of students gave their lives and tens of thousands of them were ready to die to liberate our country from the juggernaut of Sheikh Hasina’s autocracy. This show of courage, solidarity and formidable defiance of despotism helped restore their dignity to a great extent, and we hope it will not relapse into degeneration ever again.

In what follows, I present two scenarios of students’ behaviour and prestige in our country — one from my student life at Dhaka University in the 1990s, and the other from the 1970s.

I resided in Surja Sen Hall of Dhaka University. Our batch completed MA exams towards the end of 1997 and our results were published in 1998. Generally, during our time (perhaps it is also true now) master’s students’ seats in halls were allocated to others only after their results were published. In other words, they used to vacate their rooms after they got their exam results. But that was not the case with me. I had to leave the hall soon after my MA exams.

It was a common practice during our student life at DU that student thugs (also known as ‘cadres’) linked especially to the ruling party used to unlawfully occupy dormitory seats. They rented out such seats to non-students or non-DU-students to earn ill-gotten money. Consequently, many DU students couldn’t lay claim on dormitory accommodation allocated to them by the hall authority.

Hall provosts, house tutors and others in the hall authority often turned a blind eye to such unethical practices of the cadres on the plea of helplessness. However, since in most cases their appointments to such offices are outcomes of their inclination or loyalty to the ruling party, there was always an allegation of complicity.

Like most other students, I worked as a private tutor and taught students at their homes. I used to leave the hall in the late afternoon and come back at night. One day I returned around 11:00pm and saw the usual scene of a group of students sitting in the guest room adjacent to the main entrance.

Once I passed the guest room, one of the ruling party students called me from the back. I was gripped by fear because this was one of the ways ordinary students were tortured. Ruling party hooligans turned guestrooms in different halls into torture cells and beat students up at night for no good reasons.

When I entered the guest room, I found a number of cadres sitting on the sofas. All of them were junior to me. They were a bit unprepared — not sure what to do or how to treat me. None of them looked me in the eye; they cast their heads down. I was standing there and nobody was speaking. There was pin-drop silence in the room for some time.

One of them broke the silence and uttered a few words without addressing me directly. Facing the toilet, he said: ‘There are chharpokas (bedbugs) in the hall; we need to weed them out.’

Once this sentence was completed to their satisfaction, the student who had called me from the back now told me that I could leave the guest room. He was actually my junior in the Department of English. I felt it was good riddance that they released me unharmed. I thanked God that I didn’t face the fate of many other general students who were tortured in the guest room in brutal manners.

The next morning my junior who called me to the guest room the previous night came to my room. He said to me politely: ‘Mahmud Bhai (Brother Mahmud), I think it is better for you to leave the hall honourably. They want your room.’

Within days, I vacated my room not for any order from the hall authority, but because of the threat — couched in profanity — from the ruling party hooligans.

By the way, ruling party hooligans harassed not only ordinary students in the halls, they also mistreated rickshaw pullers, shopkeepers and other vulnerable people — whoever came under their sphere of influence. It was known in the hall that some of the ‘cadres’ were involved in mugging on campus and in the nearby areas at night and in the early morning.

Among the victims of their mugging were the wet market retailers. These retailers used the Katabon Road (which is adjacent to Surja Sen Hall and Haji Muhammad Mohsin Hall) to go to the wholesale market of Kawran Bazar in Dhaka early in the morning to buy fruits, vegetables and other food products. They used to be robbed by some students (cadres) on their way to Kawran Bazar.

What I want to argue here is that, unfortunately, in the recent decades, a section of students at Bangladesh’s universities were involved in all sorts of crimes including mugging, torturing and even murdering. This severely tarnished the reputation of the student population in our country. But this was not the case when my uncles were students in the 1970s.

Recently I spoke with one of my maternal uncles from Comilla and one of my paternal uncles from Brahmanbaria. Both of them were undergraduate students in the 1970s. I asked them how the standing of the student population was then.

According to them, students at that time had a clean image – they were respectful and respected members of society. Students enjoyed admiration in the streets, and people felt safe in their presence. My uncle told me that during vacation when students came back to their rural areas, villagers felt safer as there were fewer cases of burglary and robbery because of their presence. This makes the contrast between the two periods all the more poignant.

On a final note, when a section of students degenerates into knaves and ruffians, it is the good students who suffer at their hands the most. For example, during Hasina’s autocracy, a number of innocent students were killed by Chhatra League cadres and thousands of others were tortured and mistreated in horrendous ways. We all remember the torturing and killing of brilliant student Abrar Fahad by Chhatra League cadres inside BUET’s Sher-e-Bangla Hall on the late night of October 6, 2019.

Unfortunately, not many of our writers and commentators bothered about their plight. Even writers and columnists among university professors didn’t talk about the sufferings of their own students at the hands of Chhatra League. General students finally took it upon themselves to liberate us all. And they amazed the whole world by standing up to Hasina’s tyranny and forcing her to flee. Kudos to our students for facilitating the downfall of a tyrant!

Dr Md Mahmudul Hasan is professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, International Islamic University Malaysia.