President Shahabuddin Ahmed has said if both the 'government and the main opposition agree to abolish their students wings and completely dissociate from the students organisations', campus violence will automatically vanish.

"Violence on university campuses, which stand in the way of good education for our students, is an issue on which I have been expressing my alarm all through."

The President was addressing the launching ceremony of two books by Finance Minister SAMS Kibria at Osmany Memorial Auditorium in the city yesterday.

There should be consensus among the main political parties - both ruling and opposition - on this and other vital national issues, he stressed.

Referring to the two books - Bangladesh at the Crossroads and The Emerging New World Order - the President said in many of the articles Kibria has expressed his concern about the future of democracy and the direction of civil society in Bangladesh. "There is no doubt that these issues still continue to be matters of big concern for all of us."

The habit of reading in a society is a precondition for helping democracy take its roots and this can develop only if the citizens are exposed to good books, he said.

Shahabuddin went on, "I understand that readership of books has been on a decline. This, as I find, is more so in the cases of political leaders and workers. If they keep themselves busy in criticising and rebuking each other all the time, how will they manage the time to read books that comes handy in times of need?"

The President mentioned that the University Press Limited had earned reputation by publishing useful and quality books in different disciplines of knowledge and established itself as a national institution.

Speaking on the occasion, Kibria said that there was no substitute for a national consensus for economic development.

"I believe in non-inflationary growth and I wrote about it. I have faith in the rule of social justice, which I wrote in my books," he said. "We must have common strategies for serving the poor."

Earlier, Editor of The Daily Star Mahfuz Anam, Vice Chancellor of Dhaka University Prof AK Azad Chowdhury, Director General of Bangla Academy Dr Syed Anwar Hossain and former foreign secretary AKH Morshed discussed different aspects of the books.

Of the two books, Bangladesh at the Crossroads deals with political, economic and cultural issues as well as various problems facing the civil society. The other book - The Emerging New World Order - focuses on contemporary world events as viewed from the South Asian perspective.