– Sunayan Chakma, former president, Hill Students’ Council
The July-August 2024 uprising that led to the fall of the fascist Hasina regime — with students playing a leading role — had a powerful impact on the hill student community in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT). It stirred and energized them immensely. In response to military obstruction of graffiti art, along with student harassment and abuse, large groups of students took to the streets. At one stage of the movement, they organized themselves under the banner of a platform called the “Hill Students’ Movement Against Conflict and Discrimination.”
On the morning of September 18, this group organized a “March for Identity” in Khagrachari town, presenting an 8-point demand. Approximately 40,000 hill students participated — an unprecedented event.
This monumental student uprising terrified the military ruling establishment. They began plotting to crush the emerging student movement in its infancy, mobilizing all the “assets” and resources at their disposal — including extremist communal settler organizations, vigilantes, and the Santu Larma faction of the Jana Samhati Samiti (JSS).
As part of this conspiracy, military intelligence, on September 18, orchestrated the abduction of Md. Mamun and one of his employees by vigilantes in Khagrachari town. Mamun was later murdered — an act seemingly intended to incite ethnic riots between hill people and Bengalis. However, due to public resistance, that attempt failed.
The very next day, September 19, the Bengali Student Council blamed the hill people for Mamun’s murder and organized a protest in Dighinala, which eventually escalated into violent attacks on hill residents. Businesses and shops were looted and set on fire. Members of the Bangladesh Army were directly involved in these pre-planned attacks, aiming for specific goals. During these attacks, Dhanarajan Chakma was seriously injured by army beatings and later died in Khagrachari Hospital.
In protest of the Dighinala attack, hundreds of people took to the Khagrachhari-Panchhari road from the evening onward. Fearing a similar attack in Khagrachari town, locals began night watches. That night, army patrols opened unprovoked fire on hill people gathered in the Swanirbhar area, killing Junan Chakma and Rubel Tripura, and injuring many others.
In response to these two attacks, on September 20, the Hill Students’ Movement Against Conflict and Discrimination organized a march and rally in Rangamati town. However, when the march reached Banarupa, extremist Muslim settlers launched a surprise attack. From nearby mosques, slogans inciting hatred against hill people were broadcast to provoke people to join the assault. In just a few moments, several thousand pre-organized settlers pounced on the marching hill students. In this brutal attack, a student named Anik Chakma was killed, many were injured, and hill people’s properties worth crores of taka were destroyed.
But what was the root cause behind these attacks? The answer is simple: these attacks were orchestrated by the military rulers to suppress the growing movement of the Hill Students Against Conflict and Discrimination. In the 1990s as well, the military had used the same tactics to quell the mass uprising led by the Hill Students’ Council — but failed due to strong leadership at the time. The more they tried to suppress it, the stronger the movement became.
While the contexts of the 1990s and the 2024 student movements are similar — both emerged after the fall of dictatorships (Ershad in the ’90s and Hasina in ’24) — they also have key differences, which are not discussed here. However, one thing must be stated emphatically: in 2024, the most despicable and visceral role was not played by the military or settlers, but by the Santu Larma faction of the JSS.
Initially, they tried to subtly discourage students from participating in the movement. When that failed, Santu Larma’s leaders began threatening the student organizers directly, declaring that protests would not be tolerated — not even under the pretext of demanding implementation of the CHT Accord.
Ironically, during the Rangamati attack, even the office of Santu Larma’s Regional Council was targeted, with 9 cars burned in its garage. Yet, our so-called “great revolutionary leader” Santu Babu and his party didn’t utter a single word of condemnation. Worse still, instead of blaming the extremist settlers, the Santu group blamed the student leaders and the UPDF for the violence.
Because of this betrayal, the military rulers found an opening — and filed cases against key student leaders of the movement. As a result, the rising student movement was abruptly halted.
A brief look at the CHT’s political history reveals that Santu Larma has never successfully built a movement himself (and arguably, never intended to). But he has been highly skilled at destroying others’ movements. This fact has been proven repeatedly. After his release from jail in the 1980s, he destroyed his own party’s anti-settler armed movement and later, in the 1990s, crushed the student-led mass movement spearheaded by Prasit Khisha in 1995–96. In reality, he has caused destruction in the name of movement — and continues to do so.
A key lesson from the political history of the Hills is this: Among the many conditions needed to build a student movement, leadership is a key one. If opportunistic, compromising, or vacillating tendencies dominate the student community, no movement can emerge or thrive. Of course, this applies to other types of movements as well.
Therefore, those in the student community who believe that there is no alternative to struggle for achieving rights — that rights cannot be gained through begging — must take a firm stand against the opportunistic and compromising elements embedded within. These groups must be ideologically defeated.
Although the student movement in the hills slowed down due to the betrayal of the Santu Larma faction in 2024, that is not the end of the story. Movements never proceed in a straight, simple, or easy path. The brave Jumma students of the CHT has never accepted defeat. Time and again, they have risen — and in the future, they will rise again like a volcano, with even greater force.
And when they do, Santu Larma and his faction, along with the military rulers, will be swept away like straw in a flood.
(The End)
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