Politicization of Student Politics in Bangladesh: Historical Experiences and Contemporary Trends

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to review the long glorious history of student politics in Bangladesh under different regime and to illustrate the recent trends of student politics. The study includes two parts, first part is entirely based on a literature review and second portion includes a field survey. Twenty two literatures have been selected as a data set through searching Web of Science, SCOPUS and Google Scholar databases by using the relevant keywords for reviewing the past experiences of student politics. On the other hand, a field survey has been conducted using the unknown population sampling technique, where student’s perceptions toward present student politics have been explored. From the literature review, it is found that student politics in Bangladesh has a magnificent past history of fighting and greatest sacrifice for the national interest during all turning points of the country, including anti-British movement in 1940s, the language movement of 1948 to 1952, six point movement of 1966, mass upsurge of 1969, liberation war of 1971, and the falling of military dictator Ershad in 1990s. Unfortunately, the impression of this historic student politics have been transformed to the personal goal accomplishment after starting democratic forms of government in 1991, when student organizations are mostly found to be used as the political weapons of mainstream political parties. The results of field survey also complemented that the perception of present party backed student politics is mostly focused on personal agenda or their mother party’s political agenda rather than national or common interest of the students.