YouTube screencap of groups of student protestors directing traffic in Dhaka, Bangladesh after the killing of two teenagers by speeding buses. By Saleh Ahmad Like other high school students, Abdul Karim Rajib, 18, and Dia Khanam Mim, 17 had many hopes and dreams for their lives. One had hoped to become an army officer, the other, a banker. On July 29, 2018, around noon, the two teenagers were killed in the streets of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, by three buses speeding against each other for no reason other than to arrive first and cram as many passengers into their already overcrowded interiors, for maximum profit. This was not an isolated accident. Every year, more than 12,000 people lose their lives to road accidents in Bangladesh, and those are just the ones reported. 12,000 deaths that were completely preventable had the laws been followed. To say that traffic law enforcement in Bangladesh is lax is an understatement. Traffic congestion near New Market in Dhaka, minus auto rickshaws, which are prohibited from using that street. PHOTO: b k via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0) This time, however, we said enough is enough. Young Bangladeshis like me are sick and tired of fearing for our lives on the roads—fearing being run over by a bus or truck simply because the driver values making money more than human lives. We are tired of forming human chains on roads only to be ignored by our leaders. We are tired of empty promises from people who travel in VIP entourages, never having to face the precarious reality of moving around on Bangladesh’s roads. So we took to the streets and protested. It began with the students of Shaheed Ramiz Uddin Cantonment School and College, Rajib and Mim’s high school, at the site of the accident on Airport Road, mere minutes after the incident occurred. On the second day, they spread across the city and by the third-day protests were taking place citywide, with participants from nearly every school in the city. Students protest the death of two students in a road accident in Dhaka Airport Road. Image via Wikimedia Commons by Asive Chowdhury CC: BY-SA 4.0 Commandeering major intersections of the city, we protested the deaths of Rajib and Mim, demanding exemplary punishment and that the government get serious about implementing road safety measures, expressing our demands in a nine-point list. We took over traffic control, making sure that vehicles stuck to their lanes, travelled on the right side of the road, and that a lane was kept clear for emergency vehicles. We made sure that—for perhaps the very first time in this nation’s history—traffic laws were strictly enforced, with everyone equal in the eyes of the law. Screenshots from Facebook highlighting some of the effects of protestors’ efforts at traffic management. We stopped the Commerce Minister Tofail Ahmed’s entourage from driving on the wrong side of the road. We stopped the police deputy inspector general and found that his vehicle had no registration certificate, nor did his driver have a driving license. And when another police officer was unable to produce his own driving license, we made sure he was fined by one of his colleagues. These are just a fraction of the traffic violations we caught among the thousands of cars we stopped. And this was all done by students in our early to late teens, as our placards unapologetically announced. These protests, in many ways, represent the grand unification of the students of our nation across the curriculum, gender, and social class. University students joined in, and parents and guardians supported us with food and water. For the first time in ages, one felt that burst of optimism often associated with youth. A collage of photos taken from Facebook. Left: A student holds a placard that reads: “We don’t want 4G internet speeds, we want justice at 4G speeds”; Centre: A student holds a placard that reads: “Bumper crop of Lemons in Dinajpur”, above the BTV logo, a references to the fact that TV channel BTV has zero coverage of the protests; Right: A cartoon pokes fun at the students’ assuming control of traffic law enforcement. Saturday came and we were as determined as ever to continue protesting. The government had by this point stated that they would agree to our demands, but as recently as April 2018, the same leaders had made promises to another group of protestors, then went on to distort the original demands and deem them unfeasible. We refused to leave the streets until they’d actually begun fulfilling our demands or presented a solid, detailed process for doing so. So we continued our protests. Until the Bangladesh Chhatra League (BCL), the student arm of the Awami League ruling party arrived on the scene.