B'desh in complete chaos as 300 Indians return home; Protestors set free hundreds of prisoners

Bangladesh is at a mad unrest and the law and order of the country has gone for a toss. The reason? job quotas that reserve more than half of civil service posts for specific groups, including children of veterans from the country’s 1971 liberation war against Pakistan.

What started as a mere protest has turned ugly in the last couple of days with the student protesters storming a jail in the central Bangladeshi district of Narsingdi and freeing the facility’s inmates before setting it on fire, as police struggled to quell unrest, with huge rallies in Dhaka despite a police ban on public gatherings.

Telecommunications were widely disrupted on Friday amid violent student protests in which at least 64 people have been killed this week. Dhaka’s police force earlier said protesters had on Thursday torched, vandalized, and carried out “destructive activities” on numerous police and government offices.

Meanwhile, the protests have forced Indian students to return home using any available means, with over 300 crossing through border points in the northeast on Friday alone. Many of the students who returned were pursuing MBBS degrees and most of them were from Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Meghalaya, and Jammu and Kashmir.

Two key routes used by the students to return on Friday were the International land port at Akhurah near Agartala in Tripura and the international land port at Dawki in Meghalaya. The students said they were waiting and watching but finally decided to temporarily leave Bangladesh after a near-total shutdown of the internet was put into effect on Thursday and telephone services were also severely impacted, effectively cutting them off from their families.