Hold DUCSU election immediately

ELECTION to Dhaka University Central Students’ Union (DUCSU) is not taking place over the past 27 years after the last annual election being held in 1990. As a result the varsity students remained deprived of their right to elect their representatives and are not having any say in the running of the country’s biggest university in absence of their representatives in the 105 member Senate. DUCSU has five-member representation in the Senate; who are entitled to vote in the election of VCs and other functionaries. They are also designated representatives of students to take their problems and mismanagement in residential halls to the VC and the Senate to resolve those problems. But since those posts are now remaining vacant over the years without DCCSU election there is none to protest manifold irregularities and corruption grabbing the country’s highest academic institutions.

The biggest backlash from absence of DUCSU election and central student bodies’ election in other public universities has come in the form of shutting the door of creating new generation leadership for the country. In fact this is unfortunately the common scenario in all public universities while private universalities don’t allow student body in their campuses. The successive governments from 1991 discouraged constructive student politics in the campus to stop protest against corruption and their repressive politics. The vacuum is so far reaching now that students denied of creative activities are indulging in mugging, killing and other violence. Ruling party backed student cadres are holding control of the campus denying access to activists of their rival groups. It has turned the campus into a battleground.

We can’t deny the fact that DUCSU leadership has played the most pioneering role to organize unflinching protest against the repressive regime of Pakistani rulers that ended in the creation of independent Bangladesh. Dhaka University created so many outstanding leaders in the past but the door is now almost totally shut. More hoodlums are now being created instead to endanger the social life. It appears political party leaders – be it in the government or in the opposition are afraid of constructive student politics and want to use them as muscle men to protect power and destroy the opponents.

As it appears Dhaka University students are becoming impatient as the blocking of their creative activities is ruining their future while the nation is going to face growing crisis of competent leadership that Dhaka University has always produced. Students in the campus held demonstrations recently demanding the long-pending DUCSU election. In our view the voice of 37 thousand students of Dhaka University can’t be shut for long and we share their demand and ask the varsity authorities to hold DUCSU election immediately.