Editorial-May 20, 2014
The police make no serious effort to prevent crime. They wake from their slumber only after criminals strike. The conviction rate remains as low as four percent. Gun-toting political parasites run amok in public with impunity. So much for the efficiency of the guardians of the law!
But, the police swing into action when undergrads and workers take to the streets. Student protests have, no doubt, become a public nuisance. It is the ordinary public, especially those dependent on public transport, who suffer most when some roads get closed owing to student agitations. However, protesting students must not be treated like criminals while killers, rapists and armed robbers are handled gently.
Several students taken into custody for defying a court order to hold a protest against a controversial reduction in the duration of the Allied Health Sciences (AHS) degree programme were bailed out on Monday. Some of them had been badly roughed up. Censuring the police for the manner in which the suspects had been treated, the court is reported to have said it will not issue orders banning student protests in the future. What else could the judiciary do when its orders are grossly abused by the so-called guardians of the law to unleash brutal force against student protesters?
One of the injured students’ mothers was shown on television breaking down in tears and demanding to know from the powers that be whether it was wrong for her son to protest against the pruning of the duration of his degree course. She warned that the parents of protesting students, too, would be compelled to take to the streets unless justice was done. It behoves the government politicians who do everything in their power to ensure the safety and happiness of their progeny to refrain from harming others’ children.
Undergrads must not allow their protests to be turned into political circuses much to the inconvenience of the public. But, the government must take the blame for violating their rights and creating situations where bankrupt external political forces could tap student unrest to fuel their sinister political projects. If it had solved the AHS students’ problem without causing their protests to spill over into the streets, a crackdown could have been avoided. The issue has been totally mishandled.
AHS students are accused of intransigence because they have refused to agree to a ‘compromise solution’ that the AHS students who qualify for specialising will be allowed to follow a four-year degree course. But, students’ contention is that the original course duration should be retained.
Higher Education Minister S. B. Dissanayake has said he is with the students in this instance, but his ministry is helpless because it has to act according to a court ruling that all stakeholders including the Government Medical Officers’ Association get together and sort out the issue. The doctors are opposed to a four-year AHS degree, he says. Let Minster Dissanayake be urged to stop running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. He is trying to wash his hands of the issue by directing the students’ anger at the doctors.
The police must not be allowed to assault undergrads engaged in protests on the pretext of carrying out court orders. They, we repeat, must stop treating students like criminals.
By provoking students into staging street protests and then ordering crackdowns the government is only helping further the cause of ultra radical political elements bent on disrupting universities.
It is high time someone explored the possibility of invoking the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court again to solve the AHS issue. There does not seem to be any other way to get students out of harm’s way.
