For all latest news, follow the Daily Sun's Google News channel.
A young man, who we are informed is a student, is seated on a chair at Dhaka University while a few academics stand around him in supplicant mode. The young man, a product of the mob generation seizing the country in the eighteen months in which Muhammad Yunus and his unelected regime lorded it over the land, does not have the decency to stand up and apologise to the teachers standing around him for his outrageous behaviour.
Across the country, school students storm the offices of their headmasters and headmistresses, shout expletives at them and demand that they resign because they have been ‘in fealty’ to a political party that has fallen from power. Parents infuriated by teachers who have good reason to reprimand their unruly children turn up before the teachers and physically assault them. A student picks up a chair and hurls it at his elderly teacher, who somehow avoids being hit on the face.
This is the pain, indeed the dark legacy that has come down to us in the last two years. This is the price we as a nation are paying for the misrule which characterised governance, or a lack of it, in the period between August 2024 and February 2026. One wishes that one could claim that the darkness --- of school, college and university students persecuting their teachers in various modes of misbehaviour -- were now over. Sadly, the trend continues, as the recent fall-out of the rains on student behaviour has so amply shown.
Young men and women appearing at the Higher Secondary Certificate examinations certainly have had very good reasons to complain about the insensitivity of the authorities regarding the ordeal they have faced in the incessant rain on their way to the examination centres. But note the sheer lack of respect in them for those who matter, indeed the abusive behaviour many of them resorted to in registering their grievances. They did not spare the education minister, at whom they hurled words and phrases no decent young student or child has ever done in this country before.
It is not a condition that helps the nation any, for these unruly young men and women -- we observed their fellow young people indulging in open public theft of state property at Ganobhaban and in vandalising the historic home of the Father of the Nation before bulldozing it to rubble -- will grow into adulthood and move into careers and parenthood as elements in whom respect for elders, for society and for country vanished with the culture of abuse that became the norm in the Yunus period, shaming this nation as it has never been shamed before.
When obscenity becomes the hallmark of a generation, it is the future of a country which is imperilled. Observe the obscenities, the lewd comments which flow through social media, with the unruly young hurling insults at political leaders, at teachers, indeed at men and women who have always been held in esteem by their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. Those insults are again a dark legacy that will be hard to roll back, for the Yunus regime, flushed with mob support, thought little of the disgraceful way it was subjecting Bangladesh to humiliation worldwide by placing eminent citizens in handcuffs and hauling them to court. Spectators and politically partisan lawyers, swiftly transforming themselves into mobs baying for blood, cheerfully hurled eggs and shoes at these hapless prisoners.
And that was a lesson our unruly young people adopted as normal behaviour. Observe the embarrassing way they refer to women’s private parts and what they feel like doing to them. Think back on your times, on the moral principles ingrained in you by your parents’ generation: respect people, stand when an elder enters the room, keep your head bowed as you speak to your teachers, look upon every woman as you would look upon your sister and your mother. Our parents inculcated the spirit of intellectual enquiry in us, taught us to argue, decently and politely, in defence of the ideas and causes we believed in. When, therefore, the young place a garland of shoes around the neck of a freedom fighter, we know how values and decency have suddenly eluded these misguided elements around us.
That spirit of enquiry was badly dented by the Yunus cabal. Education calls for respect for politicians with whom one might not agree on policy or approach to national issues. But education, meaningful education, has never taught us that leading politicians’ images can be pasted on dustbins and for government officials -- recall a journalist on Yunus’ team -- shamelessly to throw waste into them even as they pose for the camera. When an advisor to Yunus shows no deference to the scholars and intellectuals awarded the Ekushey Padak and continues to sit on a chair, not at all embarrassed about those awardees standing behind him, we spot a culture of sanctioned rudeness seizing the country. When an advisor takes the oath of office before the President of the Republic and then in brazen manner pulls down the portrait of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in that room, we know how philistinism has taken hold of the land. These are among the sinister tales Yunus and his associates will forever be remembered for and will forever be condemned for.
In the eighteen months between August 2024 and February 2026, an entire generation of young Bengalis was led astray by design. Citizens aware of history, of organised cruelty unleashed in the past in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy and Fascist Spain, stood mute witness to a replay of that moral outrage on their doorsteps here in Bangladesh.
What forgiveness, then, for those who through the exercise of crude power have left us the legacy of youth happy to demonstrate brazen manners in public? What mercy for those who have bequeathed to Bangladesh a generation taught bad manners and so light-years removed from the sophistication that comes of education?
____________________________________
Syed Badrul Ahsan writes on politics, diplomacy and history