If you google Bangladesh Chhatra League, you will find numerous awful images of incidents involving the pro-Awami League student body. Google can aggregate those pictures as they were published in various sites, including that of news outlets.
Such incidents have resulted in, according to media reports, over 125 deaths in the last eight years with the latest casualty being a BCL activist in Sylhet yesterday.
The victims include 60 BCL leaders and activists killed in internal feuds and 11 BCL men who died in clashes with rival organisations. The rest 54 are children and common people.
The BCL men started to draw widespread condemnation for their unruly behaviour immediately after the AL returned to power in January 2009. Annoyed, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resigned from the post of BCL's organisational leader in April that year.
As they did not refrain from indulging in unlawful activities, her office next year issued a note of caution ordering the home ministry to take necessary actions against tender violence and other misdeeds by any organisation even if it is backed by the ruling party.
Numerous incidents suggest that making money and establishing dominance over educational campuses and city areas have been the root causes of almost all the violence.
To keep them away from wrongdoings, Awami League General Secretary Obaidul Quader even offered them jobs and money if they need. But the offer proved to be inadequate.
In the past, BCL men were warned but very few of them were punished. Therefore, warning alone no longer work, say political analysts.
MONEY MATTERS
Mostly the wrongdoings of BCL and Bangladesh Jatiyatabadi Chhatra Dal (JCD) -- student fronts of the AL and BNP respectively -- gave student politics a bad name after the restoration of democracy in 1991.
Since the fall of autocratic Ershad regime, Awami League and the BNP in turn has been ruling the country, except for brief periods when caretaker administrations held office.
It is money, not any ideology, which now matters. Desperation for making money in whatever ways possible eventually has changed the lifestyle of leaders of the two major student bodies.
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