The incidents taking place in the wake of the death of a DU student are truly cause for concern. The post-death repercussions have assumed such proportions that the need for finding out the causes behind the accident and bringing the culprits to book have now taken a backseat. Initially, it was a brawl between the rampaging students and the police, and after that the supporters of the Jatiyatabadi Chhatra Dal entered the fray. They pounced on the students who had kept the Vice Chancellor and the Proctor of the university captive at the Institute of Fine Arts. The students were demanding the proctor's resignation as they suspected that he had a role in the police assault on the mourners on Sunday. All these are indicative of the campus being gripped by lawlessness of an intractable nature.

The riotous situation that prevailed on the campus for many hours on Sunday is the outcome of poor handling of the agitation following the student's death. The presence of the police on the campus only served to make things worse, let alone their being on a beating spree. Overall, the snowballing of the situation is reflective of failures at many levels. The capacity for rational handling of a crisis situation has been sorely missing. Inevitably, demonstrations become a casualty of misdirected anger and of political divisiveness in the end. It seems the natural proclivity of the ruling party or its student wing is to see some kind of conspiracy against them in the protests. They also appear to be under the impression that the opposition might take an advantage of the situation. Thus the untimely demise of a promising life is turned into an occasion for political vandalism. What a pity!

The events that have taken place on the DU campus in the last two days are hard to explain, because nobody expected that a tragic death would be followed by such unwanted and wanton violence that obscured mourning into an extended tragedy.