Yes, these are understandable: revenge killings, targeted destruction of property and retributory lawsuits filed against figures associated with Sheikh Hasina's deposed government. These are understandable in the light of the revolution that has just occurred. However, to understand should not be to accept.

The students whom the revolution has put in indirect control of national affairs, at least for the time being, need to understand that the only way to overcome the legacy of vindictive incarceration, extrajudicial executions and enforced disappearances attributed to the overthrown regime is to revert to the rule of law, not bypass it.

It is essential that the rejection of the old order should not be accompanied by the rejection of all order. That is so also in the field of education, where, after all, the students possess the greatest agency for change.

Unfortunately, the danger of anarchic rule is present in the education system. That danger is apparent not only in the upper echelons of the system, which have witnessed a wave of resignations from crucial administrative positions, but lower down as well.

Professor Shamsad Mortuza of Dhaka University calls attention to a disturbing trend: the humiliation of teachers who are enduring mob-induced resignations. He writes in The Daily Star: "There is no shortage of video clips in this digital age: a young girl, maybe 12 or 13, along with her friends, grabbing her teacher's wrist to force her to sign the resignation letter; a young boy gleefully gloating that it felt good to slap 'Dipon sir,' or a teacher falling sick in the midst of the hullaballoo of his resignation demand." He adds: "We are witnessing a carnival in which our educational system collapses, unleashing the hidden demons."

Those are wise words uttered in the aftermath of what is being called the second liberation of Bangladesh after its first liberation from Pakistan. What is required at this revolutionary moment is historical introspection.

Revolutions

One historical context for the current upheaval is the French Revolution of 1789. Far more than its predecessors, the English Revolution of 1688 and the American Revolution of 1776, the French Revolution has provided a violent template for all its great and worthy successors, including the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Chinese Revolution of 1949 and the Vietnamese Revolution that unified the nation ultimately in 1975.

The French Revolution was emancipatory of course, but it produced Maximilien Robespierre, the architect of the succeeding Reign of Terror. The leading member of the Committee of Public Safety from 1793, Robespierre oversaw the execution, mostly by guillotine, of more than 17,000 declared enemies of the revolution. He also was successful in enabling the radical Jacobins to prevail politically over the moderate Girondins. However, as the public mood turned against the new times for a variety of reasons, Robespierre and several of his followers fell out of the grace of power and were guillotined in Paris before a cheering mob in 1794.

The times changed, the mobs changed, the victims changed, but the guillotine remained the same.

The Bolshevik ascendancy within the Russian Revolution produced its successes as well, not least the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922, but that victory bore the marks the Red Terror when the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police, carried out mass executions against remnants of the Czarist regime and the upper classes.

The extermination of class enemies bore the bloody mark of the split between the radical Bolsheviks and the moderate Mensheviks that had peaked as early as 1912. According to a historian, Bolsheviks wanted a party of professional revolutionaries and limited membership. Mensheviks believed instead that "socialists should strive only for what was achievable at the given historical stage of development; they must postpone socialist changes and concentrate instead on establishing a bourgeois-democratic order - a parliamentary republic and democratic government elected by universal suffrage". In that spirit, Mensheviks preferred to have a broad-based party with open membership. Bolsheviks won the Marxist argument at that stage, but the Russian Revolution lay reversed in 70 years, a blink in the historical eye. Radicalism can fail. Today, not many Marxists would like to be called Mensheviks, but even international Bolsheviks by and large have chosen parliamentary democracy as the road to socialist emancipation. They include students well-versed in the intricacies of Marxist-Leninist historiography.

In the case of China, the Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976 sought to eradicate the material and intellectual traces of all pre-revolutionary eras by overthrowing the cultural practices and educational institutions associated with the country's Confucian legacy. Students played a vanguard role in the creation of an avowedly new society. To say the least, that national insurrection not only failed to advance the cause of the Chinese Revolution but delayed China's emergence as a global power till Mao Zedong died and Deng Xiaoping took over. The chastised students returned to reformed reality.

My own encounter with the wayward idealism of steel and blood occurred during the student-centred Naxalite movement in West Bengal. Mercifully, I entered Kolkata's Presidency College in 1974 after the upsurge had passed, taking with it such glaringly revolutionary acts as the killing of unarmed traffic policemen and the defacement of statues of Iswarchandra Vidyasagar, among other icons of the Bengal Renaissance. The students who participated in the Maoist movement did not succeed in creating a new renaissance any more than they succeeded in destroying the old one. In time to come, they re-embraced the ways of bourgeois society. Some returned to the parliamentary path that they had once consigned to the dustbin of human history. But it was too late.

Today's Bangladesh Revolution is not perceptibly a Marxist one. However, neither was the French Revolution. What France did, and what was incorporated into its Russian, Chinese and Vietnamese variants, was a violent desire for immediate and irreversible change that materialised for a while and then disappeared into the ideological unknown.

Bangladesh deserves better. Its students must go farther than their international counterparts in history.

The writer is Principal Research Fellow with the Cosmos Foundation. He may be reached at epaaropaar@gmail.com