PANIC gripped thousands of bachelors living at residential messes in the city as police are raiding such facilities to nab militants. College and University students and office going bachelors are facing serious uncertainty in the situation while house-owners remain in doubt whether or not to rent houses to bachelor tenants. A sense of panic is chasing house-owners after the attack in Gulshan Café and subsequent disclosure that militants lived in a rented flat in the area to prompt police to enhance watch on tenants and house-owners. They want to make sure the identity of tenants now before renting houses or flats to young people.
News reports said many house-owners who rented their houses to bachelors are now asking to vacate them. Nobody is ready to take risk of militants who may be living in those messes. Police search and house-owners’ extra cautions are turning bachelors’ life unlivable in the city. Students live in constant fear as police raid their messes at midnight. Specially thousands of admission seekers to colleges and universities who come from middle income rural families are passing an uneasy time now to find living accommodation. Meanwhile anxieties of their guardians run at the peak. It is indeed a highly critical time never experienced by bachelors in the city before.
It is highly unusual now as students are watched at schools, colleges and universities. Not only students are panicked, their guardians are also passing sleepless night as to what report may come on the activities of their wards. We don’t know when such vigilance on common students would end, because the government believes that the specter of militants’ attacks may only be held under control by watching all students; which is not fair. It is true law enforcers must scan each and every corner to deny hide out to militants but widespread harassment of students may also prove counter-productive at the end.
We know most educational institutions have not sufficient hostel facilities or rented accommodation. But when students attempt to hire a flat or house, house-owners now obviously look at them with suspicion. Although by refusing to rent, they also incur huge financial losses.
But the arrest of a leading university teacher who rented his flat to militants of Gulshan attack, knowingly or unknowingly we don’t know, made most owners nervous to rent their flats to persons not known to them. In our view the environment must immediately improve to make the search of militant selective encouraging house-owners not to be panicked in renting houses to bachelor students. Militants may be screened out in many other ways.
