No let-up in Juba League, BCL atrocities
IT WAS the turn of the Juba League, the youth front of the ruling Awami League, to hog the headlines, needless to say, for wrong reasons while, just a week back, the Bangladesh Chhatra League, the AL students' front, hogged the headlines for a clash between the two factions of its Jagannath University unit, which left 57 people, including seven journalists, injured. According to a report front-paged in New Age on Friday, pre-polls infighting in Juba League left three of its activists killed in Jhenaidah Tuesday night. Notably, the Juba League and the Bangladesh Chhatra league have been regularly hogging the headlines, simultaneously or by turn, for their excesses and atrocities, since the AL-led government assumed office in January 2009. The two factions of the Juba League, according to the New Age report, engaged in a clash with sharp weapons over extending support to two rival councillor candidates in the municipal polls to be held on January 13. According to the superintendent of police of Jhenaidah, as quoted in the report, both the groups had been engaged in tussle for long.
It is to be pointed out, as we did in these columns many times before, that once subduing significantly their political opponents, particularly the activists of the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party, in the wake of the assumption of office by the AL-led government, the Juba League and Chhatra League have repeatedly engaged in internecine clashes. They even sometimes clashed with each other as well. On almost every occasion the reasons behind those clashes involved extortion, rent-seeking, abduction, tender manipulation and the like. But, regrettably, both the government and the ruling party have thus far displayed a curious blend of indifference and indulgence with regard to the many incidents of excesses and atrocities of the Chhatra League and Juba League. While there have been tough talks from the leaders of the government and the ruling party, these have hardly been translated into decisive, demonstrative and deterrent actions, legal or organisational, which appear to send the message to the law enforcers that the troublemakers belonging to the ruling quarters should be left alone. As a result, the ferocity and frequency of such incidents have gone up.
However, it is imperative that the government and the ruling party should act decisively and demonstratively to rein in the troublemakers in Juba League and Chhatra League immediately. At the same time, the conscious citizens need to raise their voice against continued excesses and atrocities by the two organisations and sustain the pressure on the ruling quarters for decisive and deterrent actions.
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