DHAKA Campus politics has always been a serious business in Bangladesh, but now the death of five students at universities in less than two weeks has forced the government to step in.

The wave of killings began on February 2 at Dhaka University when a third-year student, Abu Bakar Siddique, died during a campus battle between rival factions of the Chhatra League — the student wing of the ruling Awami League.

Student politics “is becoming increasingly violent to a level that we cannot tolerate anymore,” Home Minister Shamsul Huq Tuku told AFP.

Late on Friday, police said an Awami League student activist was gunned down in the capital, bringing to five the number of deaths in the unrest that has swept Bangladesh's top education institutes.

The violence spread last week with police in Rajshahi, 190 kilometres west of the capital Dhaka, finding the mutilated corpse of a Rajshahi University student, said to be a supporter of the Chhatra League.

On Thursday, police found another Rajshahi University student's bullet-ridden body hidden in a house near the campus.

And police in the country's second largest city of Chittagong recovered the badly disfigured body of a Chittagong University student that had been stuffed down a manhole.

The government and the Chhatra League blame the Islami Chhatra Shibir — the student wing of the country's largest islamic party, Jamaat-e-Islami — for the recent attacks. Jamaat and Shibir claim the Chhatra League is responsible.

“We have ordered law enforcing agencies to crack down on Shibir supporters across the country,” Tuku said, while declining to comment on whether violence by his party's student wing would also be punished.

Bangladesh has a culture of violent student politics, especially on public university campuses. All three of the country's main political parties have strong student wings, which they fund and sometimes arm.

Police have arrested at least 200 people in connection with the violence, police spokesman Nawsher Ali told AFP. He added that nine police officers had been suspended after the Rajshahi University incident for dereliction of duty.

“They did not do enough to prevent the violence,” Ali said.

The head of Jamaat-e-Islami in Rajshahi city, Ataur Rahman, has also been arrested on suspicion of involvement in the attacks.

The campus clashes have been raised in parliament by the government and opposition, with both sides saying the other must rein in their student followers.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resigned from her honorary position as head of the Chhatra League in protest at a previous wave of violence.

“Student politics has become polluted,” the vice chancellor of Dhaka University, Arefin Siddique, told AFP.

He said much of the current fighting was instigated by the leaders of the student political parties, the majority of whom were no longer students but “gangsters” making money from their influence within the university system.

On Bangladesh's campuses, everything from getting a place in a hall of residence to getting served in a cafeteria is controlled by student politics and freshers are forced to pick a side in order to access basic services.

“Ninety per cent of the students (at Dhaka University) come from outside of Dhaka and hence need logistical support. The money they get from their parents is nothing and survival is hard here,” said Siddique.—AFP