The police on Wednesday detained 54 agitating students from the secretariat in Dhaka as they stormed into the key point installation and began to stage a demonstration in front of the building of the education ministry there.
The students, who failed or achieved poor results in this year’s Higher Secondary Certificate and equivalent examinations, staged the demonstration demanding the cancellation of ‘discriminatory results’ of this year’s HSC and equivalent examinations and their re-evaluation based on the subject mapping method on all subjects.
The incident took place inside the secretariat though a ban imposed by Dhaka Metropolitan Police on meetings, rallies, processions and protests near the chief adviser’s official residence Jamuna and the secretariat was in effect since August 25.
The students stormed into the secretariat on Wednesday to stage a demonstration over the HSC examinations for the second time since the interim government was formed on August 8, three days after the fall of the Sheikh Hasina regime amid a student-led mass uprising on August 5.
Dhaka Metropolitan Police’s deputy commissioner (media) Md Talebur Rahman said at about 8:00pm that they detained 54 students and kept them in Ramna and Paltan police stations.
‘They are being interrogated,’ he said and added that no case was filed against them so far.
Siddique Zobair, senior secretary of the Secondary and Higher Education Division under the education ministry, told New Age that they had sent the students’ demands to the advisory council for consideration.
At about 3:00pm on Wednesday, a group of students, mostly failed ones or poor result achievers, stormed into the secretariat and sat in front of building number 6 that houses offices of the education ministry.
They chanted slogans demanding re-evaluation of this year’s HSC and equivalent examinations’ results by using the subject mapping method on all subjects.
The interim government, after holding examinations on seven subjects, on August 20 cancelled the remaining six examinations due to the students’ protests, and published results using the subject mapping method on the cancelled subjects, based on the students’ results in the Secondary School Certificate and equivalent examinations, and through the usual evaluation of answer sheets of the seven examinations.
The agitating students termed the results ‘discriminatory’ as two methods – the subject mapping method on the cancelled examinations of six subjects and the method of usual evaluation of answer sheets of seven examinations they sat for – were used in preparing the result.
They chanted slogans against the ‘discriminatory’ results and demanded re-evaluation of their results in a discrimination-free way using the subject mapping method on all subjects, based on the results of their results in Secondary School Certificate and equivalent examinations.
After sometimes, the members of the law enforcement agencies requested the agitating students to leave the place but they denied.
The police then chased and dispersed them.
Though most of them left the secretariat, a few stayed inside it.
Later, the police picked up the students staying inside the secretariat in two prison vans at about 4:30pm.
A huge number of the members of the police, the Bangladesh Army, and the APBN were deployed at the secretariat during the incident.
On October 14, only a day before publishing the HSC and equivalent examinations’ results, some students came to Dhaka Education Board demanding an ‘auto-pass’ in their HSC examination.
On October 20, under the banner of ‘HSC Batch 2024’, a group of students confined the employees of the board for nine hours demanding the cancelation of the ‘discriminatory’ results and re-evaluation of their results. They also forced the board chairman Professor Tapan Kumar Sarkar to announce his resignation.
On October 20 and October 22, groups of students confined the Mymensingh education board officials for several hours.source: newage
