Bangladesh Jatiyatabadi Chhatra Dal (JCD) has condemned and strongly protested the display of a controversial photograph of Muhammad Ali Jinnah from 1948 at the historical museum of Dhaka University Central Students’ Union (DUCSU).
In a press statement, JCD said Jinnah, standing at then Racecourse Maidan, now Suhrawardy Udyan, on March 21, 1948, had declared that “only Urdu will be the state language of Pakistan.”
Dhaka University students immediately protested against Jinnah’s “extremely arrogant” statement, and that resistance later formed a fundamental basis of the Language Movement and the Liberation War, it said.
“Displaying the photograph of that controversial leader at the DUCSU museum, which was the birthplace of the movement for Bengali self-determination, is a direct insult to the legacy of the Language Movement and the independence movement,” the statement said.
JCD said it is observing with deep concern that the current DUCSU leadership has completely failed to resolve students’ accommodation crisis, ensure their basic rights and create a proper educational environment.
Instead of addressing the legitimate interests of students, the current DUCSU leadership has turned the council into a tool for implementing its own specific political and ideological agenda, the organisation alleged.
From what it called an “attempt” to change the name of Madhur Canteen to “Ishrat Manzil” to the installation of Jinnah’s controversial photograph at the DUCSU museum, these “continuous activities” prove that the “Shibir-controlled” DUCSU council is abandoning students’ aspirations and the university’s spirit of liberation while displaying its “covert affinity” towards the forces defeated in 1971 and its “love for Pakistan,” JCD alleged.
JCD President Rakibul Islam Rakib and General Secretary Nasir Uddin Nasir said Jinnah’s photograph, as an opponent of the Bengali language, must be removed from the DUCSU museum immediately.
They also demanded that DUCSU’s use as a platform for promoting the ideology of any particular political group be stopped.
They said all attempts to distort the historical landmarks and spirit of Dhaka University, including the historic Madhur Canteen, would be resisted.
They said just as the university’s students had risen in protest in 1948 against Jinnah’s “arrogant” statement seeking to impose Urdu as the state language, JCD would, together with general students, build a united resistance against any “evil force” to protect the progressive spirit, history and heritage of the university.