The anti-quota movement, after much blood spilling and severe damage to public property over last few days, has been fairly settled in court and out of court. The nation sighs with relief that the crisis is over. The nightmare seems to be gone as dawn breaks. As a matter of fact, after the Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s speech to the nation on 17 July 2024, in which she gave a broad hint that the quota issue would live up to the expectations of the agitating students, the situation should not have been aggravated as it had been. The prime minister, in her speech, assured the agitating students of the government’s willingness to reform the quota in public jobs. Despite this remarkable leniency on the part of the government, the anti-quota movement led to complete anarchy and lawlessness in the country that was really the limit. The protesters’ embarking on the vandalism spree and the increasing number of casualties across the country must not define the youth’s movement as a democratic manifestation of their fundamental rights enshrined in the country’s constitution. If we compare this movement to the 2013 Shahbagh movement launched by the previous generation of students demanding capital punishment for the war criminals, we will notice a marked difference between them. The Shahbagh movement was, sort of, a glorious revolution that did not lead to acts of vandalism. But what happened in the name of anti-quota movement made the country slide into complete anarchy. The genuine anti-quota students, however, claimed that they were not complicit in those atrocities, and this sounds a credible explanation. Not only that, the anti-quota students demanded that the miscreants, whoever they may be, should be tried for the alleged atrocities they committed.

Who are the miscreants who committed the atrocities during the movement? In the midst of the anti-quota protesters were seen miscreants with lethal weapons and aggressive behaviour. Many of the student demonstrators are crying in alarm that their demos were hijacked by extremists who wrought havoc on numerous infrastructures and public properties, such as, the metro rail station at Mirpur 10 and Kazipara, disaster management department, the elevated express toll plaza, a large number of City Corporation vehicles, Bangladesh Television Bhaban, fire stations, data centres, community centres, hospitals, railway lines, submarine cable, and many other places. They set fire to police vehicles and killed a policeman and hanged him. They dropped students from the roof of a high-rise dorm like sacks of groceries. The vandals seem to have sought vengeance against the government and the political party it belongs to.

Their ulterior motive is clear. They have got nothing to do with the anti-quota movement waged by genuine students. They must be BNP-Jamaat terrorists as evidenced by their exiled godfather Tariq Rahman’s oral intervention in the anti-quota movement and the leakage of telephone talks of some of the BNP leaders and by lots of circumstantial evidence. Having repeatedly failed to land on their feet and continue the anti-government movement themselves, the BNP-Jamaat folks were looking for an opportunity like the anti-quota movement for long. The moment they saw the quota reform movement of the impressionable youths was about to mark the successful culmination, they climbed on the bandwagon and tried to fish in the troubled waters. They jumped the gun that led to this series of atrocities.  The nature of the atrocities and the professional expertise of the vandals testify to the fact that they are highly trained terrorists supported by parties which are plotting to overthrow the government by means of violence, vandalism and anarchy. That they tried to seize control of the national television centre smacks of their plan. They released prisoners by breaking the jail among whom there were many militants which proves that they are all birds of a feather. As the Al Qaida terrorists destroyed the Twin Towers to strike a blow against America’s pride, the Bangladeshi home-grown terrorists tried to strike blows at Bangladesh’s brilliant feats of engineering. Given their militant tendencies, it is reasonable to assume the vandals would have even tried to destroy the Padma Bridge had they not been held in check by the law enforcers in time.

However, the most auspicious event in the whole scenario is that the government representatives and the anti-quota protestors have come to the negotiation table. The Appellate Division’s verdict on the quota case and the government’s prompt decision echoing the court verdict in toto helped soothe away political tensions. The genuine quota-reform protesters must be happy with the dispensation of 93% of the government jobs on merit as has been ruled by the court. But the BNP-Jamaat infiltrators will not be satisfied unless Sheikh Hasina’s government is toppled. This infiltration of terrorists was a serious impediment to the solution to the quota crisis. Their aversion to Sheikh Hasina’s development works is manifest in their vandalising the Metro stations, Bangabandhu’s images in the BTV Bhaban.

Now how to get rid of the situation created by the unruly BNP-Jamaat cadres? The government is addressing the issue in right earnest. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina rose to the occasion and took a very firm grip on the situation. She has appeared as the saviour of the country. Almost all of the disciplined forces—the Army, Navy, Police, BGB, RAB—are working hand-in-hand under her directives for the earliest return to normality. She has satisfied all the demands made by the students. But she must get tough with the vandals who, complicit in plotting the overthrow of the government, are bringing the country to the brink of anarchy and economic collapse. The representatives of the anti-quota protestors in response to the goodwill gesture of the government showed a mature and responsible attitude to the crisis. They have dissociated themselves from the right-wing extremists who wanted to use the innocent students as a human shield against the government. Now, the students and the government have reached a win-win situation and the miscreants have been turned down. The father of the nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman used to say that in the long struggle between truth and falsehood, falsehood may win the first battle but truth wins the last.

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The writer is a former Vice Chancellor of Islamic University Bangladesh