Women’s struggles cannot be compressed into a monolithic, homogenous
movement, because our lives are caught within a complex mosaic of
religious, ethnic, caste hierarchies and class interests. While our
first experience of subordination is in the family, gender relations of
power are mirrored in communities, labour markets, political and legal
systems. As in the rest of South Asia, women in Bangladesh have engaged
with populist movements for independence and democracy with some
expectation that the promise of freedom and equality would extend to
gender relations. But the reformist agenda of the newly independent
state, despite its commitment to constitutional rights, failed to
challenge entrenched relations of power within the family and the community.
By the mid-seventies women’s lives were conditioned by contradictory
pressures of an official Islamisation, compulsions of a market economy
and the international women’s movement. Some glimpses down memory lane
reveal the course of women’s struggle for freedom and justice and their
modes of resistance against the obstacles they faced.
Seeds of a progressive, non-communal movement
Within the larger struggle women began to script an alternative world
view. Since early days when Roqaiya Sultana made women’s seclusion an
issue of public debate, progressive women have challenged the controls
imposed by communal politics and religious fundamentalism. Secular
democracy was viewed as promising more space for women’s voices.
In the communal divide that convulsed India in 1947 urban, middle class
women such as Lila Nag, Ashalata Sen and other members of neighbourhood
samitis formed in Dhaka during the civil disobedience movement crossed
the religious divide and worked together with Sufia Kamal and others who
had migrated from Calcutta. Together in Dhaka they sheltered Hindu
victims of communal violence, set up a secular school and campaigned for
communal harmony.
In the sixties, as the language movement was reinforced by a growing
consciousness of economic exploitation and political disenfranchisement
in East Bengal, women activists challenged the government ban on
broadcasting Tagore songs on TV and radio and women newscasters from
wearing a traditional teep on the forehead. Government suppression of
the right to a national language, to their culture, to their land was
reason enough to engage with the growing political resistance but women
also saw the bans as a denial of their personal autonomy.
Women came into secular, progressive movements from separate streams.
Cultural activists, older members of urban, neighbourhood samitis from
politically conscious, educated bhadrolok families and women students
mainly from the left, Marxist groups came together to form the Mohila
Porishod, which was backed by the Communist Party. The kinship links of
its members contributed to its ideological moorings, which were anchored
within secular, progressive politics. Women were also active in peasant
movements. Ila Mitra and Hena Das led the Tebhagha movement in North
West Bengal and tea garden workers in Sylhet. They worked at the grass
roots and had to face prison sentences along with their male colleagues.
If the “woman question” surfaced in their internal discourse, a
conscious reference to gender oppression and gendered politics did not
enter the public debate until later. So that in public accounts or in
public statements by women leaders the subjective remained invisible.
Justice for war crimes
The issue of rape as a war crime and victimhood has recurred in feminist
debates, with early concerns for women’s welfare, family honour and
state protection giving way later to concerns with sexual violence,
women’s autonomy. In 1971, rape as a weapon of war was justified by
Pakistani soldiers as a victory for Islam. The survivors found little
freedom in the aftermath, as economic insecurity, social stigma and
family rejection served to emphasize their dependency and exclusion.
State prescribed abortions and state patronized marriages were offered
as compensation to women survivors, while their victim hood served the
cause of national martyrdom The Parliament needed to be nudged by two of
its members Nurjehan Murshed and Badrunnessa Ahmed to acknowledge women
who had fought in the war, or become victims because of the war.
At the time, women activists, such as Nilima Ibrahim, Bashanti Guhathakurta and
Naushaba Sharafi scoured the countryside offering comfort and hope to
rape victims and widows. While many informal groups offered welfare, the
war-torn economy gave little hope of cultural and institutional change.
It is only recently that women survivors have found the courage to
recall their experiences in the war, their personal pain and loss, their
economic dislocation and sense of isolation. The issue of justice
remained suspended until Jahanara Imam took a leading role in demanding
a trial of war criminals in the nineties. Her leadership was particularly critical as political parties that had collaborated with the Pakistan army in war crimes, had surreptitiously made a come back through official patronage.
Contending with sectarian controls
Sectarian and communal politics were super scripted over secular and
democratic constitutional principles, following a military coup in the
mid seventies. Between 1977 and 1987 when fundamental constitutional
amendments were imposed by two military dictators (General Ziaur Rahman
and General Ershad) religion became a weapon of political control.
Official patronage paved the way for mosque led political propaganda,
resurrection of a communal leadership and a proliferation of madrassahs,
whose students became ready foot soldiers in political and communal
conflicts.
The threat of Islamisation prompted many women’s groups, along with
religious minorities and liberal groups into street protests and to seek
justice in the court. While women joined the protests in large numbers,
Nari Pokkhyo, a small women’s group, filed a class action in the High
Court against the Eight Constitutional Amendment because it denied
constitutional guarantees of equality. The question has been evaded as
hearings were never held. An attempt to introduce Arabic in educational
curriculums met with strong resistance from students who were supported
by progressive women’s groups.
Market driven development
While religion became an arbiter of social and gender controls, women’s
labour became critical to Bangladesh’s entry into global markets in the
eighties. Strategies for micro-credit and contraceptive technologies
were eagerly taken on by governments and disseminated through a
mushrooming of internationally funded NGOs to poor women. At the same
time their role as drivers of an export led economy created a scope for
proletarianization of women workers. Bangladesh interpreted the
international discourse on women’s integration into development through
a hierarchical, male dominated government bureaucracy.
The first UN Conference on Women in 1975 had identified
under-development with the invisibility of women’s economic
contribution, while at the second UN Conference in Nairobi in 1985 third
world women critiqued the effects of structural adjustments and the
market economy on their lives. In Bangladesh, women’s labour made a
major contribution to two major foreign exchange earners-garments ad
shrimp exports. But there entry into the market offered no improvement
in the quality of their life nor in the security of their livelihood. On
the contrary, salination of the South West due to shrimp enclosures
endangered traditional livelihoods threatened the appropriation of farm
lands. A strong resistance of village women who had carried out
subsistence agriculture on Polder 22 of Herinkhola in Paikgachha led to
a direct conflict with the shrimp lord. Korunomoyee, a woman farmer, was
brutally killed on November 7, 1989 by armed gangs, employed by the
shrimp lord as she led the procession. She became the symbol of
resistance to the ravaging of the environment by an export economy and
her death anniversary is commemorated by villagers in front of a mural
dedicated to her courage.
Politics of violence against women
Media reportage of violence against women within the household and
outside, around the mid-eighties, politicized the issue, women activists
were able to articulate a human rights perspective. Women friendly legal
aid and human rights organizations mobilized around legal reform, law
enforcement to make women conscious of their rights. They then protected
women’s interests in marital disputes by intervening in traditional
mediation councils. Their efforts were directed to persuading
traditional village leadership to accept gender equality in relations of
marriage, property and inheritance rather than turn to unfair customary
or religious practices of hilla marriage or dowry. Since the early
seventies Mahila Parishad had proposed reform of personal laws and
political participation, demands that have now become near universal
amongst women’s groups.
The courts became the site for redressing gender injustice. Sensational
cases of domestic violence such as Rima’s murder by her husband (in a
well known middle class family) forced feminists to evaluate the deep
rooted causes of violence in the politics of gender imbalance. Growing
evidence of violence in the public sphere and in the work place, or
violence against political rivals provoked us to question the role of
the state in perpetuating gender hierarchies. Women’s protests became
more focused on issues of security and rights and led to the formation
of the Oikkyo Boddho Nari Samaj. Campaigns for a uniform family code and
laws to criminalize dowry, polygamy gained ground. The government
responded with cosmetic changes in an anti-dowry law that failed to
address the economic and social basis of inequality. Inability to
understand the reality of women’s lives allowed for the persistence of
archaic, discriminatory inheritance laws. A similar short sighted
approach has led governments to criminalizing the symptoms rather than
addressing it as a consequence of social, legal and economic injustice.
Negotiating the democratic space
With the end of Ershad’s military rule women began to see in the
impending transition to civilian rule an opportunity to conceptualize a
gendering of citizen state relations. A small group of women after
opinion surveys and intensive discussions in 1989 and 1990 drafted a
charter for establishing women’s rights within the family and the
community and for their participation as citizens in a democratic
framework. But in the rough and tumble of electoral politics, the "woman
question" was side lined, and even staunch women party activists were
pushed out of the running for electoral nominations.
The confrontational culture of polarized politics in the nineties has
encouraged the proliferation of regressive dogmas. In 1993-94 the media
reported on incidents of fatwa instigated violence, which led to torture
and deaths of women in different villages of Bangladesh, their
humiliation or social ostracisation. Fatwas ordered women not to work
outside their homes, to close down NGO run rural schools. Law agencies
did little to curb these anarchic tendencies as progressive writers and
poets were declared murtads, leading to social censorship and fear.
Investigations showed that small groups formed under different
appellations but allegedly backed by leading extremist political parties
were responsible as the government looked away.
Women’s defence lay in constitutional guarantees of equality and
international commitments to human rights made by the state. In the
first case of a fatwa that led to the death of Nurjehan in Moulvi Bazar,
a Maulana and his seven accomplices were convicted. Women organizations
played mobilized wide support for their public campaign against
fundamentalist attacks throughout the country and in international
networks. Several years later two High Court judges issued a suo motu
rule against fatwas that prescribed hilla marriage. Although an appeal
was filed by an extremist political organization against the rule, women
have relied upon it to resist maulanas’ decrees in some places.
Women are now on the frontline in resisting the state’s complicity in
gendered oppression. Our legal battles have led to the conviction of
four policemen for the rape and killing of Yasmin, a minor domestic
worker in 1995. The Sammilito Nari Samaj inspired a country wide
movement that challenged the (a) impunity of state agencies, (b)
patriarchal tolerance of violence (c) insecurity of women workers and
oppression of child labour. University women students came together to
form a platform against sexual violence in Jahangirnagar and Dhaka
Universities to break the silence on sexual violence in academic
institutions. But we need to recognize that we need to move beyond
technical legal remedies, towards a transformative struggle for peace
and tolerance of differences. We need to transcend the limits set by
political allegiances and recognize in the kidnapping and disappearance
of Kalpana Chakmas in 1996, allegedly by military officers, a
commonality with the violence against women in 1971. We need to
recognize that when the rights of women workers are violated or when
minority women are threatened, it is equivalent to an attack on our
collective struggle for autonomy. Our resistance to gendered power and
violence would make for a meaningful change if we were to transcend the
limitations of our class, ethnicity and particularly our political
affiliation.