A story of walls

To get to the Ekushey Boi Mela held on the hallowed grounds of Bangla Academy situated at the equally hallowed grounds of the Dhaka University campus, you can take any one of three routes. You can enter the premises through the road leading to Doyel Chattar from in front of High Court, or take the route of Nilkhet-Arts Building-TSC and finally, through Shahbag straight towards TSC.

Every year, the Ekushey Boi Mela is held commemorating the lives lost in the fight for our independence in the linguistic hegemony West Pakistan tried to impose on us, leading to the tragic deaths of Salam, Barkat, Rafique and others on that fateful day of 21st February, 1952, a movement largely orchestrated and executed by the students of the very university that houses the book fair and the monument erected in honour of our brave language martyrs. To say they broke through the wall of West Pakistani oppression and bureaucracy to reach their end goal is to undermine the sacrifice these people made in ensuring our ability to speak our native tongue, but since this is a story of walls put up and walls left standing, it is noteworthy to ask the readers to hold on to that thought.

Every year, our honourable Prime Minister makes a trip to the Dhaka University campus to lay flowers to the spiritual graves of our language martyrs and inaugurate the Ekushey Boi Mela for the general public. To mark the occasion, barricades are set up at every entry point to the university campus restricting access to the general public on the eve of 21st February, as a security measure and as a means of curbing the enthusiasm of the general public in catching a glimpse of their dear leader and the daughter of the nation.

Here, you have your first wall.

The second wall is a wall that is not just erected on a particular day or for a particular event, but is equally, if not more, relevant towards the analysis we're trying to construct here. It's a wall that is faced by lakhs of people from the remotest corners of the country every single year, a wall that only 40,000 are allowed to cross through the thin gate, the gatekeeper of which is the system of education in place in Bangladesh – if you have not yet guessed, it happens to be entry into the "highest echelon of education" in the country, University of Dhaka. They all sit for an exam that is biased towards a certain brand of education, a certain approach to it that eliminate the scope for others while playing a game of impossible averages that detract all manner of candidates, from the lanky English Medium graduate dreaming of studying in the same Physics department run by S.N. Bose to the Dakhil pass who dreams of entering the foray of public university graduates vying for a government job. There are special privileges, ways of getting around the wall via shortcuts, through various quotas including a teachers' quota, Muktijoddha quota or through the Adivasi quota, although some feel these quotas are divisive and are detrimental to the overall system of entry to DU in the face of the challenges faced by a "regular" candidate in gaining entry. Lets, for now, banish these opinions to more figments of imagination in the hopes of gaining more concrete grounds for an analysis worthy of the praise of the esteemed civil society of Bangladesh.

Let us talk about physical walls, then, since barely anything is more concrete than bricks and mortar. Anyone bothered enough with such matters will have come across the countless walls surrounding various student halls, teachers' quarters, departments and libraries in DU, covered with messages from various student bodies and organisations, each with their own unique twist and flavour.

Some ask for the immediate release of a certain "Pintu bhai" from jail, others decry the rising costs of education, and yet others ask passerby's to try and murder a stenciled portrait of Avijit Roy in the vain hopes of reaching out to a wholly illogical population regarding the illogical murder of a proponent of logic and free thought. Mostly though, the messages are in praise of the PM's valiant battles against the forces opposing democracy, the forces trying to take away our seas, and her commendable efforts in ensuring a just and fair trial against our war criminals in the road map to progress that she has laid out for us.

We digress. After all, this is a story of walls, and walls have ears. What we forget quite often is that walls have mouths too, and the mouths they have speak loudly to those who care to listen. Back in 1952, those very walls spoke out against the attempts to contain our ability to speak our native tongues, and come 2016, our walls have somehow lost the ability to speak out against injustice and blindness persisting in our very own state.

Seems strange? In the magical reality of post-independence Bangladesh, even our walls seem censured, doomed to a lifetime of being left alone for precisely a year till the calendar turns over to the second week of February each year, when the walls of Dhaka University are "cleaned up", anticipating the arrival of our PM for the official inauguration of that feverish rise of Bangali nationalism that Ekushey represents. The cries for the removal of security forces from the Chittagong Hill Tracts, "posted" in a naively hopeful manner by the local student body of indigenous students, are painted over in blinding white, all before an army of party backed students paint pictures of blissful pleasantries directed at the government for the great job it is doing in ensuring human rights. So censured are the walls of DU today, that private university students took to the desperate measures of painting on the streets of Dhanmondi and on the sides of buses and luxury cars in Gulshan to have their cries of "No VAT on education" heard.

You might think, and rightly so, that the hallowed halls and walls of the University of Dhaka have fallen far behind the glory days of when we successfully exerted our will to speak whatever language we pleased and say whatever mattered to us in that language. You'd be right in imagining as a member of the upper middle class civil society bubble of Dhaka, having rarely visited the DU campus or not having paid much attention, that all the walls of Dhaka University are covered up in the span of time between the start of preparations and the arrival of the PM on the eve of February 21. You'd be wrong, because precisely three sections of the campus are censured every second month of every year. The road leading to TSC and Bangla Academy from Shahbag, the road leading to Shaheed Minar from Bangla Academy and TSC, and the road leading to grounds that house the Vice Chancellor of Dhaka University, opposite the Arts building. Every other wall adjacent to every other road, are left untouched, the moss left to reclaiming the bits of wall used to expel useless messages of equality, egality and everything in between. Surprisingly, this extends to the walls of houses of the Pro-Vice Chancellor and the Treasurer, who apparently do not matter enough in the larger discourse of things to have their walls covered up and repainted every year. It's surprising to see a string of words that amount to "a revolutionary sheds blood in the course of a revolution, yet he sheds blood even if he is not a revolutionary" on the walls lining Fuller Road, which house the largely bourgeois, largely upper middle class and sadly uncaring persons that make up the large body of faculty members of this once great university.

Physical walls matter less in a political economy that involve digital walls more often than those made of concrete. However, even these un-concrete but still valid walls of social media shares and posts are censured, so why do we even expect that physical walls will fare better, carry more meaningful messages, and more importantly be more effective? Why, in our immense naivety that permeates our very existence as Bangladeshis, do we hope that a paint brush and a can of red and black paint will have any effect on the stone cold hearts of ordinary citizens commuting to and fro through the largest open-for-public-commute-university in the world?

It might have something to do with the mentality that forced us to fight for our independence and our right to speak our language in the first place, a mentality that is more tangible and more coherent than this fiery brand of largely phony Bangali nationalism we're being taught to practice. Will it amount to anything, ever? Only time will tell.

The writer is sub-editor, The Daily Star.