This story is about ULAB, a club that has now turned into a full fledged gang, and two controversial characters — Moinak Kanungo, a Hindu who eloped with a Muslim girl, and Mehdi Rajeb, an open atheist who attacks religion in class and married a girl from the club he was running — a club where he takes students for multiple days to remote mountain locations and runs them wild, later forming them into a gang.
IN SUMMARY — SOME FACTS:
- Two in-charges of the club — one an open apostate and atheist, who speaks against Islam in his classes, and married a girl from this “adventure” club. The other a Hindu who married a girl from a Muslim family without their permission.
- Girl from this club admitted in front of witness she was trained and involved in Gulshan alcohol drinking party
- Multiple seriously suicidal girls from this same club
- Faculty in-charge were holding secret meetings with students to resolve issues, openly admitted by students of this club
- Faculty discussed their religious opinion and controversial background with students of this club
- Faculty in-charge openly sought to promote their students, including as teachers to pass their students above and beyond their academic performance
- Students from the club were organized in a cult-like fashion and best efforts were made to place them within the university, with active lobbying from the two in-charge
- In-charges were caught lying multiple times regarding operations of the club and shown to be protecting the club by all means possible.
- Evidence exists of faculty in-charge knowing of romantic and sexual activities and actively encouraging such activity, including on social media, pressing like buttons and commenting positively on such postings.
- American woman is running some kind of “student affairs” that looks more like a social experiment with heavily manned counselors and a large number of student “mentors” and support staff. Actively encouraging an agenda.
- One in-charge manages court cases and bribery for the university owners. The club members also get unprecedented access to the owners including getting invited to their mansion.
A society unable to protect its children is already lost.
Thomas Babbington Macauley (1800–1859) was a British philosopher and employee of the East India Company. He advised the company in his Minute on Indian Education (1835):
Official funds should only be spent on English and Western Education in India to produce a class of persons who would be racially Indian, “But English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” Such people would also be loyal to the British out of recognition of their moral worth.
My nana was an MP in the Jukto Front, and a friend of Bongobondhu. I left Bangladesh at the age of 8. I came back recently for a stint of two years, teaching at a few universities here. Having no clue about the politics going on in our society, I found myself in a “liberal” private university where my eyes increasingly began to see and, and ears hear things that left me sleepless. Ultimately I left Bangladesh again, shocked and horrified at what is happening here.
I found a ProVC tell me that the masjids in the country was the problem with Bangladesh. As much as I have my own prejudices against some of the things that goes on in such places, but to be so anti-religious for a PVC in a Muslim majority country was eye-opening. I found a VC who thought Kolkata is the “civilized version of Bangladesh”. Aside from the matter that the VC has no academic background in understanding what the term civilization means, I found it shocking that such a high ranking person would hold such views.
I found a university quietly promoting Hindi and India in different ways, and when publicly denounced, claim they didn’t know anything, and it was just something that happened “by accident”.
An American woman, a Feminist, who married the son of an industrialist, appeared to be running the university from behind closed doors. The industrialist’s son was now in-charge, and the university was an extension of their empire. She was quietly pushing a feminist agenda from behind using a team of student affairs employees. This included direct, secret and subversive intervention between female students and their families.
The environment they were creating caused many female students to remove their conservative attire within the first year of attending. It caused normal kids, to get into everything from alcohol, drugs, having sexual relations and getting mixed up with Gulshan / Banani parties.
I found certain event management companies recruiting from the university. These girls would be “trained” for 2 weeks. Coming largely from middle and lower-middle class backgrounds, they would be lavished in an affluent setting, given a makeover, taught how to eat, talk and walk, taught aerobics exercise and meditation. Once trained, they would work in sales and also quietly, in hosting alcohol serving parties in Gulshan.
I saw the father of such a girl who had no clue what was happening. He was a Pir sahib and some type of leader of a religious political party, with a strange looking flag by his window. He spoke something about sacrificing a lot of animals at some grave of a Sufi. He told me India will take over Bangladesh, but his crystal ball had not told him what was happening in his own family. The girl had not only served as a hostess in Gulshan alcohol serving party but also was running around with a boyfriend for multiple days in Bandarban and other remote locations in the name of club related activities. Let alone the now common dating around Dhaka. And the university was telling me not to say anything to him, with an impression of a threat if I do so.
I found girls that had been groomed as above, or otherwise, working in Gulshan / Banani alcohol serving parties, somehow finding themselves in the PR material of the university and often given coveted jobs and scholarships there. They would then be the face of the university, for aspiring students to look up to. Students where telling me that the environment that this has created made them ashamed to be part of the university. If the students say anything, even if a senior student tells something to a junior, the student affairs office would take action against them, even in the name of sexual harassment.
Faculty members, some openly shared how they felt and how things were being run. One told me that the university tolerated everything other than Islam. Another said he put the minimum effort because he felt the agenda didn’t match his religiosity. Yet another felt afraid to openly greet people “assallam alaikum”. Yet another said he thinks the university has set up a student group to monitor the activities in the university.
In fact, I found that a certain “adventure club” was organized like a cult and what can be best described as “running wild”. They were involved in a lot of controversy and yet enjoyed a privilege with the university and was closely involved with a lot of university related activities. Members of the club would also frequently get jobs with the university.
Two months before I left this university, a final semester student approached me. He was a “core member” of this adventure club. He spoke to me about a severely suicidal girl in this club he was trying to help. I was in fact aware of two other cases from the same club, including one having handed me a suicidal sounding note.
I asked him why most of these cases were taking place inside this one club, and he agreed, that such cases were concentrated here. He explained there were many more such cases and that most were being kept quiet and dealt with internally, by a tribunal of the club faculty advisor and some core student members. I had received information on about 6 girls from this club, and every single one of them was going through some severe emotional, spiritual and psychological problem.
Of the two faculty members, one had married a girl from this club and was an open apostate who drank alcohol. The other was a Hindu who had married a girl from a Muslim family without their permission. Such were the two characters put incharge of taking young students up in the hills and forests for multiple days by the university.
On one occasion, I went with them on a trip and saw that students, multiple boys and girls were inside a room for a long time. On inquiring later, one of the faculty supervisors said nothing happened, although he was not there, his informant let him know that nothing happened. This informant was a former student who somehow, even after a year of graduation was still taking part in university trips, and was seen dating girls in restaurants around the university. In this trip I also so students sitting along as couples, late night, out in the garden in secluded spots.
Students from this club could not only misbehave with faculty, they were given every privilege, including visiting the owners’ mansion, something faculty members were unable to do. Students failing classes would have the two supervisors of the club petition to pass them because “they were great guys and were good at other things than studies”.
More recently they took students to India, for 18 days, and the environment was almost completely that of couples having romance. The Hindu supervisor was incharge and of course “saw no evil, heard no evil and spoke no evil”.
The question is, what was going on? My attempt to talk to them yielded no results. All I received was a stonewall of denial and when specific evidences would be brought to them, they would resort to attacking me or the person who provided the information and even giving veiled threats. Yet, I persisted with my investigations and, over a period of a few months, I had found the following:
- The club was organized on the lines of a cult. Here are some common characteristics of cults:
- They attempt to ensure that information does not flow outside the cult
- They establish their own legal system within
- They react collectively to perceived outside threat
- There are almost always potential whistleblowers
- There is a tendency towards sexual activity within
- There is a tendency towards suicidal behavior
- The leaders always have an agenda of some sort. The club advisor’s agenda became quite clear. In every little thing his agenda would come out. For instance, he enlisted my help to prepare some singers. He insisted on organizing it as a church choir and to have an Indian singer’s song rather than a Bangladeshi’s.
- There is a tendency to give patriarchal or matriarchal names. I found the advisor calling himself their “father”.
I found that this adventure club fulfilled every criteria to the dot. They even had their own secret committee to solve internal disputes, and fought back as a group when confronted.
- Cults are very often formed via brainwashing. A textbook method of brainwashing involves sleep and food deprivation and constant physical and emotional stress factors often over 3–4 days.
Multiple day hiking trips mimic these same conditions. The club made it a point of pride in going with little to no food on such trips, on hard journeys that left students emotionally and physically drained.
We found that in these trips, once these kids were taken through the classical textbook brainwashing stages, instead of containing the situation, the faculties in charge were running them wild and further cueing them, making them feel they have to be part of a closely knit group or be an outsider.
One interviewed student indicated that the club advisor was in fact even discussing religiously controversial issues in this sensitive mental condition up in the hills; He was discussing his Hindu background and his marriage to a girl from a Muslim family, without the family’s permission. And a wide range of other controversial topics. Why was such a politically and religiously charged issue being inputed on such university trips? How could this be given a blind eye by the university?
Students tend to otherwise be very polite and respectful. But students of this club had been channeled in such a way that they could do anything, even to faculty members, including get physically violent with them.
- A large number of former students were involved in these clubs, being allowed to do so. The club seemed to be a place they can get new girlfriends from, even though they had long graduated. They were not only actively participating but organizing trips, despite having graduated, in some cases graduated a few years ago. They could also be seen dating girls from the club in the restaurants around the university. The faculties involved would attempt to help them get jobs or find excuses like visiting them to get inside the university.
- The faculties were recruiting students from their classes, giving them the impression that joining their club would help them, and showing the success of those that joined in getting coveted positions in the university.
- Recruitment to parties in Gulshan (drinking parties), and to shady event management companies were taking place from within the club and the university. Some were being offered money to work as hostesses for these parties. Others were recruited on a “sales” job, where they were being groomed for two weeks, as was discussed earlier above.
- Inquiries to the concerned authorities at the university were given a deaf ear, and a hostile reaction.
Although I have lived abroad most of my life, including in the US, and have seen my share of filth, immorality and decadence, I still found this shocking to see in Bangladesh. I was shocked to see the level of sophistication and planning involved in converting our children. Such things are harmful even in America, but in the Bangladeshi context, they are as deadly as the deadliest poison. They will wreak havoc to our society. They already are. This is because our children are highly sheltered and do not have the experience and understanding to be able to protect themselves. It’s like being thrown into the deep end of the swimming pool without ever learning how to swim, or ever seeing a swimming pool before.
My experience of these activities made me feel helpless to do anything, or even to speak up about it. I even felt that saying anything can get me in harm’s way. But how long are we going to keep silent for fear of pissing off some powerful people? A few lacs here or there can apparently silence a voice like mine these days. But our society is being damaged by this agenda. The lives of the public are being irreparably destroyed. Dead aborted babies are being found in the streets. One in three cases in the courts are related to divorce. Bangladesh was not liberated for this agenda.
Bangladesh was made for our culture, language, and way of life to be preserved. This includes our family-based values and sense of decency. Before the Pakistan Army was taking our daughters. Now we seem to have a different agenda taking them. The Pakistan Army was a product of an older agenda, and this new agenda too is a product of that same historical agenda. But today I don’t know if we still have the honor and self-respect we once had, that allowed us to defend our children before with such ferocity.
