Chhatra League banned

The interim government last night banned Bangladesh Chhatra League, caving in to demands from the student movement against discrimination.
The home ministry issued a gazette notification with immediate effect, stating that the government invoked the Anti-Terrorism Act-2009 to ban BCL, a 76-year-old pro-Awami League student organisation.
The move comes a day after the students issued an ultimatum to the government, saying that they will take to the streets unless the BCL was banned within this week.
Several hundred students demonstrating in front of the Dhaka University vice chancellor’s office cheered as the news of the ban spread.
Andul Kader, a coordinator of the student movement, announced near the TSC that students would march and spread sweetmeat on university campuses across the country in celebration at 3:00pm today.
According to the gazette, the government made the decision as per section 18 (1) of the Anti-Terrorism Act-2009 and listed the BCL as a banned entity under the second schedule of the act.
The section reads: “For the purposes of this act, the government, on reasonable grounds that a person or an entity is involved in terrorist activities, may, by order, enlist the person in the schedule or proscribe the entity and enlist it in the schedule.”
The government has evidence that the BCL has been involved in different conspiratorial, subversive and terrorist activities against the state since the fall of Awami League government on August 5, reads the notification.
It adds that the BCL, a “brotherly” organisation of AL, was involved in activities that go against public security; the crimes include murder, torture, and oppression of resident students at dorm rooms informally known as gono rooms. A large number of students stay in cramped conditions in such rooms.
The BCL took money for dormitory rooms, manipulated tender, raped, and sexually harassed women and committed other crimes after the independence, particularly in the last 15 years of the autocratic AL regime, it adds.
Information and evidence in this regard was published in major media and involvement of some BCL leaders and activists in criminal activities were proved at courts too, it says.
During the student movement since July 15, BCL leaders and activists launched frenzied and reckless armed attacks on the protesting students and the general public, killing hundreds of innocent students and individuals and endangering the lives of many more people, the notification adds.
“Bangladesh and Dhaka University are now free from stigma. We would like to thank the interim government,” said Nusrat Tabassum, a coordinator of the student movement, at Raju Sculpture of the university.