by Nurul Kabir

What we do in the world reflects what we know about it, and what we know depends on how we go about knowing, or in other words when thinking about change we should start by thinking about thinking.
   – Bawden R. and R. Macadam
   
   If one asks the people of Bangladesh, or even the country’s political elite, whether they want a constitutional provision for having rulers to perpetually govern the country by birthright, the answer will be a big no, given the glorious history of the sacrifices that the people in question have made for democracy.
   Is Bangladesh a democracy? The country’s elite, importantly among them many a member of the mainstream intelligentsia across the political divide, publicly assert that it is — the prime argument behind the claim being the transfer of power through moderately ‘free and fair’ elections. The observation is misleading, in the first place, precisely because it suffers conceptually from an unsound understanding of democracy.
   The idea of ruling a country by birthright, which is nothing but monarchy, rightly appears to be an absurd proposition in modern political systems across the world today. But millions of men and women in Bangladesh, and beyond, hardly notice, let alone question, the fact that the men govern the nations primarily by birthright, and that too in the name of democracy.
   Democracy is a way of life, with specific political, economic and philosophical manifestations in the collective existence of a populace in any given country. Democracy, to be politically pervasive, creates a ‘people’s republic’ based on the ‘general will’ of the people, which not only promises equality of citizens, but also enforces the equality in all sections of the citizenry. Economically, democracy is supposed to pursue an egalitarian policy with a clear political objective of distributing national resources equitably among citizens; and philosophically, a democratic state is supposed to put in conscious efforts to ensure emergence of every citizen as a sovereign individual, of course under the provisions of the ‘social contract’ that they enter into while organising the republic. The government in a democracy, which is supposed to be nothing but a political body of managers elected by the people through free, fair and genuinely competitive national polls, is to run the affairs of the state within the framework of the rule of law, remaining accountable to the people.
   Understandably, in a comprehensive scheme of democracy, election remains a means, indeed a very important means, to achieve certain vital ends as regards realisation of the people’s social, political and economic rights; but elections, or transfer of power from one political party to another through elections, cannot be considered a political end for those genuinely committed to democracy.
   That Bangladesh’s ‘democracy’ does not qualify to be democracy is palpably evident on another vital count — its attitude towards the female citizens who constitute more than half of the country’s population. Democratic equality means, in the first place, the equality of men and women, as much as it means the equality of citizens belonging to different faiths, classes, et cetera, particularly in terms of ensuring equal opportunities to participate in running the affairs of the state.
   
   The state machinery: predominantly a male affair
   The political perceptions of Bangladesh’s elite is visibly infected with a gendered political outlook that is inherently insensitive towards the democratic equality of men and women, which finds clear expression in the horribly low level of female representation in all the three organs of the state machine — Legislature, Executive and Judiciary.
   The Legislature, Jatiya Sangsad in other words, enjoying the authority to formulate/amend/scrap laws that are to be obeyed equally by all the citizens, including the female ones, does not have a democratically acceptable number of female legislators, in the first place. Originally, there were only seven women, including Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina, in the 300-strong parliament. Later, four years after the parliament was formed through direct elections, 45 female members were inducted into the Legislature, to fill the reserved seats for women, in September 2005, but they were chosen by the 300 Members of Parliament, not the people.1
   Notably, there were 7,50,00,656 voters2 in the last parliamentary polls. Of them, 3,63,15,684, or 48.42 per cent, were female. The total number of votes cast was 5,61,85,707, which is 75.59 per cent of the total eligible voters.3 Reports have it that the turn-out of female voters was larger than that of the males!
   Now, such a huge number of female voters, who took active interest in exercising their right to franchise, did not opt for the male candidates out of free choice. They were, rather, ‘forced’ to choose the male candidates. The reason is simple: The two power-seeking mainstream political parties, Bangladesh Nationalist Party and Bangladesh Awami League, set up only three and nine female candidates respectively, excepting Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina, who contested in five seats each.4
   The situation in the local government is no different. There are as many as 4,223 elected Union Parishads in the country, as of March 2003. Of them only 22 are headed by women. Besides, the Union Parishads have a total of 40,392 members elected to the general seats, and only 85 of them are women.5 Here, also, the number of female candidates was significantly tiny.
   The Executive wing of the state, which implements the policies and programmes of a government, is equally men-infested, or, to put it in other words, suffers from very poor representation of the female citizens.
   To begin with, there is only one woman, prime minister Khaleda Zia, in the 24-member council of ministers that formulates policies on all matters of national interest, while there are only two women in 29-member body of state ministers and deputy ministers. Of the two, the state minister has been given the portfolio of the ministry of cultural affairs and the deputy minister works, in an advisory capacity, in a division of the education ministry that looks after primary and mass education.6
   The male-female ratio in the council of ministers clearly suggests that there is hardly the required number of women to pursue the democratic causes of women in the policy formulation process of the government.
   Then there is the bureaucracy, the implementing agency of the government’s decisions, which, again, is predominantly a male apparatus.
   Presently, there is no woman among 48 secretaries of the government, no woman among six secretaries in-charge, and no woman among nine top officials with rank and status of a secretary while there is only one female among 66 additional secretaries of the government.7
   Besides, there are only 14 women in the total of 374 joint secretaries, only 134 women among 1,134 deputy secretaries, only 205 women among 1,525 senior assistant secretaries, and only 233 women among 1,263 assistant secretaries.8
   The males also heavily dominate the Judiciary — the machinery for delivering justice to the citizens, both males and females.
   There are six judges in the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court, with no female among them. In the High Court division, there are 63 judges, of whom only 3 are women. In the subordinate judiciary, there are 823 judges of whom only 112 are women. To give details, only 14 out 169 district judges, 10 out of 138 additional district judges, 28 out 185 district judges, 60 out of 331 assistant and senior assistant judges are females.9
   The abysmally low level of female representation in the judiciary indicates that the country’s political elite hardly realises the fact that even the judges need a female perspective to ensure justice.
   The government statistics shows that Bangladesh has a total of some nine lakh people employed in the public sector, of whom only 11 per cent are female, that too mostly in third or fourth class positions.
   However, it is the policy-planners of the political parties of a country, particularly those conducting the affairs of the state in a democratic dispensation, who play the most crucial role in formulating policies for recruiting human resources into the judicial and executive wings of the state on the one hand, and in nominating candidates for the seats in the Legislature on the other.
   A look at the gender composition of the policy-making bodies of the country’s two major political parties, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and Bangladesh Awami League, can provide a clue to the poor rate of female presence in the organs of the state.
   There is no female member, excepting Khaleda Zia, in the ruling BNP’s 15-member National Standing Committee — the highest policy-making body of the organisation. And there are only 12 women in the party’s 251-member National Executive Council (NEC), the second most powerful forum of the party10.
   The situation is hardly different within the Awami League. There are four women, including Sheikh Hasina, in the 15-member presidium — the party’s highest policy-making body. Besides, there are only three women in the 31-member AL secretariat, and no woman at all in the 27-member executive committee of the party. There is also no woman in the party’s 18-member advisory council.11
   With such a heavy predominance of the males in the policy making bodies of the country’s major political parties, one can hardly expect that the organisations would field democratically required number female candidates in the national polls. In the last parliamentary elections, held in 2001, there were only 38 female candidates, including the independent ones, out of a total of 1939, contesting for 300 parliamentary seats.12
   The brief almanac of the poor level of female presence in the state’s organs, and in the top policy-making bodies of the political parties that manage the state, clearly indicates that the democratically required scope for the female citizens to make their voice heard, or their equal rights effectively upheld by the wings of the state, is absent. It is, therefore, not surprising that Bangladesh ranks 79th, among 80 countries, in the ‘Gender Empowerment Measure’ prepared by the United Nations Development Programme.13
   
   Women’s democratic rights: state’s undemocratic responses
   Numerous examples can be cited to show the undemocratic responses of the different branches of the state to the calls for ensuring many a constitutionally guaranteed right of the female citizens. But here is a representative case, a single episode, in which all the three branches of the state — Executive, Legislature and Judiciary — displayed an enormous amount of disregard for the basic democratic rights of a female citizen. It would, however, require a short trip down memory lane.
   A vibrant young woman, Badhan, wanted to be part of the New Year’s celebrations in 2000. It was not only the start of a new year but also a new century. She chose Dhaka University as a safe place to enjoy the first few hours of the New Year, and the new century, perhaps believing that the ‘enlightened’ university students would be tolerant, if not appreciative, of a young woman participating in the midnight celebrations.
   Yet, she dared not go there alone. Perhaps, who knows, she was aware of the lurking dangers that await a young woman like her at ‘inconvenient’ hours in a male-dominated society. She, therefore, managed to persuade two male friends accompany her to the campus. Perhaps their presence inspired in her some sense of security.
   Unfortunately, secure she was not.
   As soon as she had reached the venue, a gang of crude revelers took her trail. They started making obscene remarks and gestures at her before swooping on her. ‘Badhan was molested, trampled by the pack of hyenas who pounced on her, some flashing their teeth in sadistic joy while they held part of her dress,’ reported an English language daily.14
   Subsequently, there was a case lodged with a police station, which eventually went to the court of law. The unsavoury episode was also talked about in parliament, although it failed to enter the official agenda. The newspapers duly reported the public remarks that the concerned police officials, magistrates and lawmakers made on Badhan’s tragedy while dealing with the issue in their respective capacities. The remarks, absolutely patriarchal and sexist, remain a clear testimony to the inherent insensitivity of all the three branches of the state towards certain fundamental democratic rights of our female citizens.
   
   Badhan and the Executive
   The members of the law enforcing agency called the police, an organ of the executive branch of the state, reportedly played the role of mute spectators when the girl came under sexual assault on the university campus. They came forward to rescue the hapless woman almost half an hour after the assault began, and that too after a section of the crowd had started protesting against the lawmen’s dastardly silence. By then, as various newspapers had reported, the girl was ‘almost disrobed’.
   Some people, men to be precise, might argue that the inaction of a few constables in the present case cannot be considered to be the standard attitude of the police as an institution. But the fact remains that the attitude which the then top boss of the concerned police station showed was absolutely identical to that of his constables. The officer-in-charge of the Ramna Police, Rafiqul Islam, rather publicly defended his constables’ inaction, and shamelessly questioned the integrity of the victim of the sexual assaults. In a bid to justify his men’s inaction, the officer claimed before the press the next day, on January 2, 2000, that Badhan was ‘improperly dressed and dancing’ and asserted: ‘What is such a big issue to you is nothing to us...If someone dances nakedly we have nothing to do’.15
   The police officer lied about Badhan’s attire, in the first place. The pictures, taken moments before the beginning of the assault and carried by a good number of newspapers, clearly showed that the girl had a decent dress on when she reached the venue. Her clothes were torn to pieces in front of the policemen. But the police officer, explicitly oblivious of his constitutional responsibility to uphold the ‘fundamental human rights, and freedom and respect for the dignity and worth of the human person’ of the citizens,16 rather made a deliberate attempt to publicly defame the victimised woman in question.
   He also proved least bothered about the republic’s constitutional edict that the ‘women shall have equal rights with men in all spheres of the state and public life and that no citizen shall, on grounds only of...sex...be subjected to any...restriction...with regard to access to any place of public entertainment…’ .17 The police boss did not find it important to make any ‘endeavour to ensure equality of opportunity to all citizens’,18 by way of protecting her ‘fundamental human rights’ to participate in a public celebration.
   
   Badhan and the (lower) Judiciary
   The judiciary, which, in a democracy, is supposed to deliver distributive justice to all sections of the society irrespective of the citizens’ religious, racial or gender identity, also displayed a crude bias against the female citizens, when it came to putting the male accused in the Badhan assault case on police remand for interrogation. While a Bangladeshi magistrate has the legal authority to put an accused in a criminal case on police remand for 15 consecutive days, and whereas there are precedents that the accused in certain cases were on remand even for more than 15 days, the magistrate in the present case turned down a police prayer for putting some of the accused on a fresh remand of three days, after the end of a five-day remand, for further interrogation.19 Moreover, the ground that the magistrate, Abul Kashem, used for turning down the prayer for remand was explicitly anti-women, and shamefully misleading. The magistrate claimed that ‘the behaviour of both the accused and the woman who was assaulted…was reckless as per newspaper reports’!20
   The newspapers reported that the sexist group of males ‘annoyed’ the woman, ‘pounced’ on her, ‘molested’ her, and eventually ‘unrobed’ her, without any provocation. No newspaper report claimed that the woman in question ‘annoyed’ the boys, ‘pounced’ on them, ‘molested’ them, and finally ‘unrobed’ them. But the magistrate, or the judicial wing of the state for that matter, found the behaviour of the female victim of the sexual assault to be as ‘reckless’ as that of the group of males that had sexually assaulted the hapless woman!!
   The magistrate, like the police officer in question, must have found a night-time outing and, that too, to join a public celebration, ‘reckless’ behavior on the part of a woman! In the process, the magistrate made a mockery of the constitutional provision pledging that ‘no person shall be deprived of...personal liberty save in accordance with law’.21
   The same male supremacist mindset of the magistrate made him forget that there is no legal bar for a female citizen to exercise her right to ‘personal liberty’ in attending a public ceremony at any time of the day or night. The magistrate, like his police counterpart in the present case, was also oblivious of the fact that the constitution of the republic pledges that ‘no citizen shall, on grounds only of...sex...be subjected to any...restriction...with regard to access to any place of public entertainment…’.22
   Under this circumstance, it is not surprising that the criminal case lodged in connection with sexual assault on Badhan is still pending with the court, unresolved, for more than six years now.23
   One wonders, given the undemocratic attitude of the executive, the judicial and the legislative wings of the state towards women, as to when, if at all, the court will eventually deliver justice to the victim of the sexual assault in question, and what kind of justice.
   
   Badhan and the Legislature
   The Jatiya Sangsad (national parliament) began its maiden session of the year on January 1, 2000 — a few hours after Badhan was assaulted on the Dhaka University campus. But the issue did not appear in the parliament’s ‘order of the day’ in the month-long session that lasted until January 30. Unofficially it came up, on January 25, when a legislator of the then ruling party, the Awami League, while speaking on a motion of thanks on the presidential address in parliament, touched on the issue.
   ‘How could a Muslim woman go for an outing at the dead of night...? Was it wrong that the drunk young men jumped on the lady who was dancing on the street with half of her body exposed?’ the legislator, Jainal Abedin Hazari, asked on the floor of parliament.24 The legislator replied to his own question: ‘It was only natural that she was treated this way.’ 25
   He was reportedly uninterrupted by anyone, including the speaker of the Jatiya Sangsad and the female members present on the occasion.
   The legislator also lambasted the newspapers ‘for writing too much on the incident’. He, however, did not take the trouble to criticise the section of the print media that published explicit photographs of the victim of sexual assault, further increasing her humiliation. The lawmaker finally observed that ‘Badhan, like Russell (the main accused in the assault case), should also face trial for dancing on the street’.26
   As regards the poor woman’s attire, the legislator cast aspersions on the woman the same way the police officer in question did, by making an extremely exaggerated statement that ‘she was dancing with half of her body exposed’. However, the political and cultural essence of the legislator’s utterances clearly state that women, particularly Muslim women, are not eligible to go out of the house at night, and that the women, if they do go out at night to attend any public celebration, will ‘naturally’ deserve to get sexually assaulted, and that there is nothing wrong in ‘drunk young men jumping on a lady’ at a public function, and that newspapers have no business giving so much importance to such incidents of sexual harassment and that the innocent victims of the sexual assault needs to be tried, along with the perpetrators of the sexual assault, in the court of law!!! A lawmaker’s crude gender bias, coupled with a male-supremacist outlook, perhaps could not have been more explicit even in mediaeval times.
   However, the lawmaker who made such anti-woman statements on the floor of parliament, and his fellow legislators who virtually nodded approval to the democratically objectionable statements by way of allowing the statements to pass without any protest, were oblivious of quite a good number of the already mentioned constitutionally guaranteed fundamental rights of the female citizens.
   Besides, all of them were oblivious of certain international human rights instruments, ratified/acceded to by Bangladesh, that obliges the state machinery to ‘take appropriate measures to’, say, ‘eliminate discrimination against women in other areas of economic and social life in order to ensure, on the basis of the equality of men and women, the same rights, in particular the right to participate in recreational activities, sports and all aspects of cultural life’.27
   It should be noted that Stuart Mill observed in 1869 that the ‘actual treatment’ of women by men was better than the ‘legal position’ of the women in the English society of the day. ‘…because men in general do not inflict, nor women suffer, all the misery which could be inflicted and suffered if the full power of tyranny with which the man is legally invested were acted on…’.28
   Just the reverse is the case of contemporary Bangladeshi women, in the sense that their actual situation is far worse than their legally stipulated situation. Legally, as already shown, the female citizens of Bangladesh are not to be discriminated against in any sphere of life — social, political, cultural or economic. But practically they are deprived of equal rights and opportunities in all the spheres of life — the poor presence of women in the organs of the Bangladesh state in general, and the bias against the women in all the three organs of the state, as shown in Badhan’s case in particular, being the glaring examples.
   The People’s Republic of Bangladesh is actually Men’s Republic of Bangladesh.
   
   Patriarchy: democracy’s worst enemy
   Patriarchy is an ideology, a political ideology to be precise, which pre-supposes the natural superiority of male over female, and therefore upholds woman’s dependence on, and subordination to, man in all spheres of life — from the family organisation to the organisation of the state. Patriarchy, therefore, stands in the way of the liberal concept of the democratic emancipation of women, or in other words, the idea of ensuring a pervasive equality of man and woman in familial, social, political and economic spheres of life.
   While a number of factors are cumulatively responsible for shaping the lives and attitudes of the women of Bangladesh, the predominant force in the social organisation of the country is patriarchy, which means that all sources of power and authority within the family, the society and the state remain essentially in the hands of the men.
   The patriarchal system not only demands a gendered division of labour between men and women — with the responsibilities of household duties and rearing of children imposed solely on the latter — it also denies the women any public space, and thereby liberty, political or economic.
   The growth of capitalism has loosened the chain of patriarchy to some extent, especially in terms of paving the way for women to participate in the process of industrial production outside the boundaries of home, but the exploitation of female workers by the owners of capital, men in other words, remains in full force.
   Notably, Bangladesh has a 9.85 million strong female labour force, involved in garments, pottery, agriculture and other small industries, of which a total of 1.5 million are involved in the readymade garments industry. 29
   But capitalist exploitation, combined with the patriarchal outlook of the capital owners, compels the female workers to receive wages which are less the half of what their male counterparts earn. While the average monthly pay of a male worker in the industrial sector is Tk 2,118, the average monthly pay of a female worker remains only Tk 1,007.30
   Moreover, the patriarchal social division of labour between men and women does not free a Bangladeshi female wage-earner from her household responsibilities. If a female member of a family decides to work in an industry, she has to do that in addition to her patriarchy imposed housework, which include, along with many other tedious jobs, preparing meals for others members of the family, rearing of children, taking care of the ageing members if there are any, et cetera, and that too without the labour of housework being recognized economically productive – let alone paid.31 Still, she would not have absolute control over the money that she earns from working in a factory outside home, because the patriarchal man ‘not only controls a woman’s person, but also tends to control most of the household’s material resources, including the labour of female and junior members of the household…’.32
   Kate Millett is absolutely right when she asserts that ‘patriarchy’s chief institution is the family. It is both a mirror of and a connection with the larger society; a patriarchal unit within a patriarchal whole…Serving as an agent of the larger society, the family not only encourages its own members to adjust and conform, but acts as a unit in the government of the patriarchal state which rules its citizens through its family heads’.33
   To be more precise, ‘the home, like the nation, is essentially a heterosexual space and patriarchal overtones instill rigorously masculine or feminine identities. The parameters of home, its exclusions and inclusions, are analogous to the narratives of nations with their preoccupation with sexuality, loyalty, identity and image.’34
   However, the presence of patriarchal components in the discourses of democracy can well be traced back even to the golden days of the classical democratic revolutions taking place in eighteenth century Europe and America. Jean Jacques Rousseau, one of the greatest prophets of classical democracy, who observed that ‘man is born free, but everywhere is in chains’ and asserted the ‘inalienability of human liberty’, proposed the structure of a democratic state, vis-à-vis monarchy, to be politically realised by way of the people forging a ‘social contract’, which is to be based on their ‘general will’, to ‘defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before’.35
   As soon as the ‘social contract’ is formed, Rousseau argued, ‘in place of the individual personality of each contracting party, this act of association creates a moral and collective body, composed of as many members as the assembly contains voters, and receiving from this act its unity, its common identity, its life, and its will’.
   “This public person, so formed by the union of all other persons, formerly took the name of the city, and now takes that of Republic or body politic; it is called by its members State when passive, Sovereign when active, and Power when compared with others like itself. Those who are associated in it take collectively the name people, and severally are called citizens, as sharing in the sovereign power, and subjects, as being under the laws of the State,” 36 while ‘laws are, properly speaking, only the conditions of civil association’.37
   It was, therefore, not surprising that the prime political slogan of the French Revolution was ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ of, and among, the people.
   The revolution took place in 1789 on the basis of the historic ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen’, but the successive regimes of democracy refused to consider women to be equal to men, and therefore denied the women the liberty they deserved. The element of ‘fraternity’ between men and women remained missing in the newly emerged body politic.
   This is exactly what forced a female revolutionary like Olympe de Gouges to write, and announce, the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Female Citizens’ in 1791. The declaration observed that man, ‘having become free, he has become unjust to his companion’ and challenged ‘the inferiority presumed of women by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens’.
   In the declaration, de Gouges asserted, rightly, that like man, ‘woman is born free and lives equal to man in her rights’, and that the ‘purpose of any political association is the conservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of woman and man’ and the rights include ‘liberty, property, security, and especially resistance to oppression’. The declaration also asserted that the ‘principle of all sovereignty rests essentially with the nation, which is nothing but the union of woman and man’, and ‘no body and no individual can exercise any authority which does not come expressly from it [the nation]’. It observed that ‘liberty and justice consist of restoring all that belongs to others’ and thus ‘the only limits on the exercise of the natural rights of woman are perpetual male tyranny’ and ‘these limits are to be reformed by the laws of nature and reason’. The historic declaration also demanded that ‘male and female citizens, being equal in the eyes of the law, must be equally admitted to all honours, positions and public employment according to their capacity and without other distinctions besides those of their virtues and talents’. Besides, said the declaration, property belongs to both sexes whether united or separate, etc.38
   Clearly, Olympe de Gouges was for forming a ‘social contract between man and woman’, without which democracy is bound to remain an affair of only half of the world’s population. But Olympe was forced to walk to guillotine after two years of composing the declaration. She was executed in 1793, although on a different pretext.
   The protagonists of the democratic emancipation of women were, in a way, destined to embrace such a fate, particularly because the champions of the mainstream discourses of democracy, Rousseau and the like, who had prepared the philosophical and cultural climate for a democratic revolution to take place in France were inherently incapable of visualising the idea of woman being an equal partner in life — socially, politically, economically and culturally.
   A great revolutionary thinker like Rousseau, who championed the cause of ‘individual liberty’ in a democratic dispensation failed to be democratic when it came to the liberty of women. “Women do wrong to complain of the inequality of manmade laws; this inequality is not of man’s making, or at any rate it is not the result of mere prejudice, but of reason. She, to whom nature has entrusted the care of the children, must hold herself responsible for them to their father,” Rousseau argues.39
   His patriarchal mindset finds crude expression when he says that “the man should be strong and active; the woman should be weak and passive; the one must have both the power and the will; it is enough that the other should offer little resistance…Woman is specially made for man’s delight.”40
   So Rousseau, echoing a Biblical precept, preaches that ‘daughters must always be obedient’41and finds it important ‘to make a girl docile’, making her ‘realise that she is dependent’ and making this dependence ‘pleasant’.
   Rousseau argues that ‘…assertions as to the equality of the sexes and similarity of their duties are only empty words’42,because ‘nature herself has decreed that woman, both for herself and her children, should be at the mercy of man’s judgment’.43
   Clearly, Rousseau advocates a gendered social division of labour between men and women, assigning the women household duties, particularly including raising the family and entertaining husbands, with absolute dependency on the men who are to be the kings of the public sphere. The entire thought-process clearly appears to be absolutely patriarchal, and therefore undemocratic. The reason behind the failure of the great French Revolution to ensure the democratic equality of men and women can only be explained by such patriarchal mindsets of thinkers like Rousseau, who, as said earlier, created the cultural climate for the revolution to take place.
   The historic revolution of the United States of America that laid its foundation stone in 1776 by holding ‘this truth self-evident, that all men are created equal’ and that they are endowed ‘…with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ 44was also equally patriarchal when it came to ‘equal rights’ of the women.
   The political elite of the United States took as many as 92 years after the revolution to accept the country’s black population as ‘citizens’ and pledge them ‘equal protection of law’ in July 1868.45 Still, the term ‘citizen’ did not imply women, black or white, in the first place.
   A historical episode may help understand the American elite’s patriarchal approach to women’s basic democratic rights.
   One of the great American women’s rights activists of her time, Susan B Anthony, her three sisters and fifteen other Rochester women registered to vote on November 1, 1872, after persuading the election inspectors that the Fourteenth Amendment to the constitution gave them the right to franchise. Four days later they cast their ballots [in the presidential Election]. But on November 18, Anthony was arrested for illegal voting. She was tried in Canandaigua the following June. A hostile judge refused to allow her to testify, dismissed the jury, found her guilty, and fined her $100.46
   Susan B Anthony and two of her comrades, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage, also wrote a ‘Declaration of the Rights of the Women of the United States’ and wanted to read the declaration out at an official function, arranged on the occasion of the centennial celebration of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia on July 4, 1876. But their request to present it was denied officially.47
   The situation in Britain was hardly different in those days. The World Anti-Slavery Convention was held in London in June 1840, and two famous women, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were there in the American delegation. But they were not allowed to play an active part even within the ranks of a reform movement. After an extended debate of four hours, the convention ruled that only male delegates could be seated: The women were to sit ‘silently behind a curtain’.48
   The condition of women in Britain did not change fundamentally even in the latter half of the 19th century. Stuart Mill wrote in 1869 that the ‘principles which regulate the existing social relations between the two sexes — the legal subordination of one sex to the other — is wrong in itself’, and identified the principle in question as ‘one of the chief hindrances to human improvement’.49
   Mill also criticised the ‘state of opinion in politics and political economy’ of the time that used to permit and perpetuate the ‘injustice’ of ‘excluding half of the human race from the greater number of lucrative occupations, and from almost all high social functions’.50 He also pointed out that certain occupations, which were ‘legally open to the stupidest and basest of the other sex’, were to be ‘interdicted’ to the female sex, ‘for the exclusive benefit of males’.
   The original Western perceptions of classical democracy underwent a sea change, for the better, in the 20th century — albeit in the face of ceaseless struggle by the oppressed classes, particularly the blacks and the women. Explaining the changes in the social and political status of English women, Bertrand Russell rightly noted that whatever rights the women achieved, including the right to franchise, did not came automatically. Rather, they had to earn the rights by practically refuting the existing patriarchal notions that women are inherently incapable of effectively operating in the public sphere of life. ‘…ually increasing number of women were engaged in making their own living outside the home, and did not depend for the comfort of their daily lives upon the favour of fathers or husbands. This situation, of course, reached its height during the war, when a very large part the work, usually performed by men, had to be undertaken by women. Before the war one of the objections commonly urged against votes for women was that women would tend to be pacifists. During the war they gave a large-scale refutation of this charge, and the vote was given to them for their share in bloody works’.51
   But Asian societies, even the economically advanced societies of Asia, have not witnessed any significant positive changes in terms of weakening patriarchy.
   Japan provides, through a pervasive social and political controversy over the proposed reforms of the gendered principle of royal succession, rather a crude example of how a ‘modern’ society could well remain the prisoner of patriarchal culture.
   The former prime minister of Japan, Junichiro Koizumi, proposed in 2005 to bring in the country’s more-than-2,600-year-old ‘male-only’ succession law to pave the way for the royal princess to inherit the throne, and that too in absence of a mail heir. But Koizumi eventually back tracked as many a leader of his own party, Liberal Democratic Party, refused to be liberal enough to support the idea of female succession to the throne, particularly after it was reported in the media in February 2006 that the wife of a royal prince, princess Kiko in the present case, got pregnant after 13 years, raising hope among the patriarchal section of the Japanese political elite that the princess might give birth to a baby boy.52
   Princess Kiko eventually gave birth to the royal family's first boy in more than four decades, on September 6, ‘easing a succession crisis and silencing calls to let a woman lead the world's oldest monarchy’, reported an international news agency from Japan. 53
   The male birth was a ‘dream come true’ for the patriarchal politicians like the Japanese foreign minister, Taro Aso, who within no time makes a pre-emptive attempt even against the possibility of the continuation of the social and political debate over the succession issue. He told the media that the royal birth meant the ‘sensitive’ succession debate ‘will not have to take place at least for another 40 years’.54
   The patriarchal thought found the crudest expression in an earlier suggestion made by a royal prince, Tomohito, that the Crown Prince Naruhito should take concubines to produce a male heir!
   What is, however, more important to note here is that it is not just a section of male politicians, or male members of the society, that think patriarchal way. That patriarchy is a political way of life finds resonance in the fact that quite a large number of Japanese women joined the jubilations over the birth of a male heir to the royal throne. “It is a wonderful thing that a baby [boy] was born. Preserving male succession is the foundation for Japan to keep its own traditions,’ said Nobuko Takemura, a 64-year-old housewife from the central city of Nagoya who joined her husband on a business trip to Tokyo just to get a commemorative news paper announcing the royal birth.55
   Meanwhile, the political naïfs in Bangladesh usually wonder as to why the country’s entire state machinery is dominated by the males, or why the state is so insensitive towards the democratic rights of the female citizens, especially when the affairs of the state have been run, for a decade and a half, by two women — Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina — who also respectively head the country’s two major political parties, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and Bangladesh Awami League. The simple reply to the bewildered naïfs is that the two female leaders, like most of their male colleagues, are cultural prisoners of the patriarchal political ideology that subscribes to the scientifically baseless idea of the natural superiority of men over women.
   That Khaleda Zia is a prisoner of the patriarchal ideology, which subscribes to the gendered social division of labour between men and women, is evident in many a policy pursued and implemented by her government. To give a specific example, her government first suspended, and then cancelled, a female wrestling tournament in Dhaka on July 4, 2004 after a small Islamist group called Jamiatul Ulama Islam demanded cancellation of the sporting event. The group had argued that sports in general, and wrestling in particular, is a man’s affair and that an event of women’s wrestling would hurt the religious feelings of millions of Muslims.56
   The government cancelled the tournament, ignoring Bangladesh Wrestling Federation’s repeated assurances of a ‘decent event’ with ‘appropriate dress code for the competitors’57on the one hand and the women’s rights organisations’ repeated demand for ensuring the democratic right of the female athletes to participate in the pre-scheduled sporting event on the other.58
   This was not an isolated case of Khaleda’s surrender to the patriarchal political outlook. Her government cancelled another sporting event between the female footballers of Bangladesh and India, which was scheduled to take place in Netrokona on January 23, 2003. The government called off the event the day before it was scheduled to take place, as a little known group of Islamist fanatics opposed the idea on grounds that football is not meant for women and that women playing football is an ‘obscene’ idea.59
   There are also examples in which Khaleda’s government did not just concede to the patriarchal demands of any obscurantist pressure group, but it also made certain pro-active moves to discard certain legally acquired rights of the country’s female citizens.
   In one such incident, the government of Khaleda Zia, or her Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development to be precise, issued a circular on September 23, 2002, depriving the female ward commissioners, elected directly to the reserved seats for women, a certain amount of authority that the male commissioners enjoy. The authority included issuance of certificates of nationality, character, birth, death and successors of a dead person, and providing assistance to those conducting an official census. The government’s circular in question also provided that the commissioners elected from general seats would head the local law and order committees, but the female commissioners elected from the reserved seats would not have the same right: They would work with the law and order bodies in an ‘advisory capacity’.
   Aggrieved by the government’s instruction, ten female ward commissioners, elected to the reserved seats of the Khulna City Corporation, filed a writ on May 3, 2003,60 challenging the anti-women administrative order on the grounds that it was contrary to the state’s constitution that bars any discrimination against any citizen on grounds of gender identity.
   The High Court issued a rule nisi on the government to show cause as to why the ‘discrimination’government’s circular should not be declared illegal and void. The government showed ‘causes’, shamelessly though, in defence of its patriarchal move discriminating against the women.
   The court, however, rejected the government’s arguments and declared, on August 16, 2004, the discriminatory clauses of the government circular illegal and void.61
   The apparent victims of all the three patriarchal decisions of the government of Khaleda Zia were a few female wrestlers, footballers and ward commissioners, but the political implications of the decisions were/are far reaching for the entire female population, which is about 70 million, on many counts, particularly in terms of the state’s general bias against women. What is, however, more important to note is that the patriarchal decisions against the female citizens were made by a government headed by a female politician, Khaleda Zia in the present case.
   That Sheikh Hasina is also not different in terms of being a prisoner of the patriarchal political culture is also evident in many of her decisions, whether they were made while in power or outside power. Her patriarchal mindset, however, found the crudest expression in one of her reactions to the perceived ‘failures’ of her party-men to physically take on their political rivals. Hasina, prime minister at that time, asked the local leaders and leading activists of Chittagong whether they wear ‘saris and bangles’ that they cannot effectively retaliate against the hooliganism resorted to by her political opponents.62
   Clearly, Hasina’s mindset subscribes to the patriarchal idea of ‘manliness’ inherent in the male activists that enables them to retaliate against the unacceptable actions of political rivals, while the male activists incapable of such retaliation lack ‘manly vigour’, and therefore are synonymous with those wearing ‘saris and bangles’ — in other words women. Clearly, for Hasina, vigour is the symbol of manhood, and lack of vigour is the symbol of womanhood. Quite an explicit display of the typical patriarchal mindset by a woman, indeed!
   The patriarchal mindset of a ruler, be it of a male or a female one, hardly makes any difference when it comes to the democratic interests of the female citizens.
   
   No one is born a patriarch: role of ideological state apparatus
   Male or female, one is not born a patriarch. But a child is born in Bangladesh, and elsewhere, into patriarchy, because the family that a child is born into is already prepared, culturally, in the first place, to mould the child’s thought process in the patriarchal way. As the child gradually grows up, s/he starts getting exposed to society at large, including educational institutions, which are, again, infested with the patriarchal culture. Then there is the state, again a patriarchal machinery, which goes on producing and reproducing patriarchy to retain and perpetuate the exploitative patriarchal social relations for the benefit of the male citizens.
   The patriarchal state, capitalist or socialist, retains and perpetuates patriarchy by two sets of apparatuses — political and ideological. The political state apparatus, which is inherently a repressive machine, functions predominantly by the use or threat of violence, ‘at least ultimately’. The repressive state apparatus comprises the government, administration, army, police, courts, prisons, etc.63
   But ‘a dominant social order would not survive if it relied only on force’ and would not produce and reproduce, ‘on a rather extended scale’, the material and ideological conditions required for its existence. Therefore the patriarchal state, to perpetuate patriarchy, uses the ideological state apparatus, which functions predominantly by ideology. The list of the ideological state apparatuses includes the family, religion, educational institutions, political parties, mass media, the culture industry, etc.64 The various ideological state apparatuses produce and reproduce ‘submission to the rules of the established order’, or manufacture ‘consents’ to the ‘ruling ideology’, patriarchy in the present case, among the citizens, particularly the oppressed at large, to make sure that they develop the intellectual ‘ability to manipulate the ruling ideology correctly for the agents of exploitation and repression’, in other words, the patriarchal ruling class.
   
   Family and patriarchy
   In Bangladesh, like many other countries across the world, patriarchy sets out its basic standards for both male and female members, young or old, in the family. The standards are, as said earlier, superiority of the male members over the female ones, subordination of the females to the male members in the decision-making process of the family, gendered division of labour inside the family, dependency of the females on the male members, etc. The implications are obvious: The future of a female child is decided almost at the moment of her birth, at times even before birth, particularly when the parents choose to know the gender of the foetus through the ultra-sonographic screening method. The patriarchal mindset, already internalised by both the parents, finds explicit expression in the entire process of rearing the child: The female child receives discriminatory treatment, negative discrimination to be precise, in terms of almost everything — allocation of food, receiving medical treatment, allocation of funds for education, etc.
   That the male members of a family are usually privileged to consume better food, both quantity- and quality-wise, was clearly manifested in the findings of a recent governmental study, which shows that 13.7 per cent of the girls, below five years of age, suffer from severe malnutrition, while the rate for the boys of the same age group is 11.9 per cent. Again, 48.7 per cent female children, below five years of age, are the victims of moderate malnutrition, while the rate for the male children of the same age group is 46.4 per cent. 65
   The situation in other patriarchal societies is no different. A study carried out in India in 2005 shows that the girl children had 10 per cent lower dietary intake of Vitamin A, which is responsible for severe disabilities such as nutritional blindness.66
   Conforming to the patriarchal outlook, the families spend more money on the education of male children, compared with the female ones, which was evident in a study carried out in Bangladesh in 2005. The study shows that the private household spending at the secondary education level for each male child per year was, on an average, Tk 8,874, and the amount was Tk 7,411 for each female child per year.67
   That the gendered division of labour between male and female is being encouraged at the tender age of the children is evident in the fact that the young female children are made to help their mothers in the rearing process of the younger ones inside the family, when the young male children of similar age are expected to play in or outside the house.68
   The said division of labour between the female children and the male ones as regards sharing of household works simply gets replicated when these children eventually grow up to men and women and enter their own family life. The men in the family hardly share housework with women, even if the latter are engaged in works outside home. On the other hand the most of the women in question, already used to think patriarchal way, find it natural for them to take the burden of housework solely on their shoulders.
   The situation is not qualitatively different even in the highly ‘advanced’ society like that of the United States of America, even after great feminist upheavals taking place in that country in the 1960s and the 1970s.
   True that the American women these days ‘do less housework than they did before the feminist revolution and the rise of the two-economic family: down from an average of 30 hours per week in 1965 to 17.5 hours in 1995…Some of that decline reflects relaxation of standards rather than a redistribution of chores; women still do two thirds of whatever housework – including bill paying, pet care, tidying, and lawn care – gets done. The inequity is sharpest for the most despised of household chores, cleaning: in the thirty years between 1965 and 1995, men increased the time they spent scrubbing, vacuuming, and sweeping by 240 per cent – all the way upto 1.7 hours per week – while women decreased their cleaning time by only 7 per cent, to 6.7 hours per week’.69
   Understandably, the traditional patriarchal cultural practices in the family substantially contribute to shaping the children’s psyche in conformity with the patriarchal way of life, social and political, in the years to come. The boys usually grow up with a male-supremacist belief system, already internalised, that it is their inalienable right, and even responsibility, to prevail on the girls in all spheres of life — private or public. The girls, on the other hand, usually grow up with a similar male-supremacist belief system, similarly internalised by the patriarchal culture prevalent in the family, that they are destined to play a role subservient to that of the males, as did their mothers throughout their lives.
   Millett rightly points out that ‘the chief contribution of the family in patriarchy is the socialisation of the young (largely through the example and admonition of their parents) into patriarchal ideology’s prescribed attitudes towards the categories of role, temperament, and status.70
   
   Religion and patriarchy
   Religions, particularly the monotheistic religions, had originally emerged in different parts of the world as spiritual platforms of the oppressed people of the time, and they took root in the concerned societies through progressive social and political movements of the downtrodden against the tyrannical social, political and economic orders of the day. It is not mere accident that the first disciples of Jesus Christ came from the poor community of fishermen, that the poor members of the Quraish clan had embraced Islam much earlier than others while the first few disciples of prophet Muhammad included a ‘slave’ like Bilal, and that the members of the Sudra caste, the lowest rung of the Hinduism’s social hierarchy, were the ones to embrace Buddhism before others.
   The monotheistic religions drew a large number of the poor victims of the exploitative socio-political and economic systems, particularly because monotheism has an inherent component of egalitarianism. The monotheistic concept that there is only one God, and that God has created the whole ‘mankind’ suggests that all the members of ‘mankind’ spread throughout earth are eligible for equal treatment — socially, politically and economically.71
   It is, therefore, only natural that the materially poor, socially ill-treated and politically powerless people took spiritual refuge in religion, particularly monotheistic religions, in the hope of getting rid of the exploitative regimes. Naturally, ‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feeling of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless circumstances…’.72
   But the problem with religions, even with the monotheistic religions, is that the spirit of egalitarianism remains missing when it comes to the basic human dignity and democratic rights of women. The ‘holy’ texts of the major religions like Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Christianity are quite patriarchal, although to a varying degree, in their outlook towards women, while the scriptures substantially contribute to the shaping of the social, political and cultural psyche of the millions — male and female — practising these religions across the world, including Bangladesh, for centuries now. In other words, the holy scriptures in question perpetually produce and reproduce in the believers, be they Jew, Christian, Hindu or Muslim, a patriarchal mindset that inevitably stands in the way of modern democratic growth of a society and state which is to uphold the citizens’ human dignity in general, on the basis of women’s equal rights with men.
   To begin with, Judaism established patriarchal male superiority over the female by its theory of human origin that says that God created first Adam, or man, and then created Eve, or woman, and that too from a bone of Adam, and thus assigned women with a role subordinate to that of the men.
   ‘And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof;
   And the rib which the Lord God had taken from man, made He a woman, and brought her unto the man.
   And Adam said, “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.”73
   Besides, the Old Testament makes Eve, the woman, commit the ‘original sin’ of being ‘beguiled’ by the ‘serpent’ in the garden of Eden and eat the fruit of the forbidden tree first, and then pass the fruit on to Adam, the man, to eat.74 Subsequently God punished the woman with ‘conception’ ‘to bring forth children’ in ‘greatly’ ‘multiplied’ ‘sorrow’, and subjugate her ‘desire’ to his, and sanctioned the man the authority to ‘rule over’ the woman.75
   Understandably, the male followers of Judaism have obvious reasons to express gratitude to God. During daily prayers, the Jewish men in the Victorian Europe used to say: “I thank Thee, Lord, that Thou hast not created me a woman.” 76 And the contemporary Jewish women were left with nothing but to say in prayers: “I thank Thee, Lord, that Thou hast created me according to Thy will.” 77
   That ‘Christianity is a patriarchal religion’ 78 is evident, in the first place, in its endorsement of the episode of Genesis enshrined in the Old Testament.
   Subsequently, Saint Paul expanded the Christian patriarchal concept of male superiority over the female to the familial, social and political levels of human existence, which again would naturally have obvious implications in the economic sphere of life too.
   Paul unambiguously preached that ‘…the head of Christ is God, the head of everyman is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man’, 79
   Explaining the Old Testament’s rib episode related in the creation of Adam and Eve, Paul clearly reminded the women, in clear terms, that ‘…the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman, but the woman for the man’.80
   For Saint Paul, the question of democratic equality between man and woman, even in a matrimony, does not arise at all. He rather finds it a holy duty for women to ‘submit’ to the men ‘in everything’ in conjugal life:
   “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.
   For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.
   Therefore as the church is subjected unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything.”81
   Paul is not against women acquiring knowledge, but he wants them to learn ‘in all subjection’ and refuses to allow them to teach, or establish any ‘authority’ over men, and he derives his arguments against women learning freely or teaching, from the Old Testament that portrays women to be vulnerable to deception.
   “Let the women learn in all subjection.
   But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.
   For Adam was first formed, then Eve.
   And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.”82
   Hinduism, which is practised by a significant section of the world population living particularly in South Asia, is not different from the Catholic precepts of life, especially when it comes to the patriarchal outlook towards the women’s personal, familial, social, political and economic status.
   The Upanishads, a collection of ‘sacred’ texts of Hinduism that still serves as a basic foundation of the Hindu world outlook, recognises ‘man’ as ‘The first embodied being’ on earth.83 Besides, it finds man’s ‘sexual fluid’ to be the biological ‘essence’ for reproduction, which is not only unscientific, but also undermines, in the first place, the role of woman in continuing the human race.
   “Life begins in man as sexual fluid,
   Which has the strength gathered from all his limbs.
   Man hold this quintessence in his body,
   And it becomes child in woman. This is
   The first birth.”84
   Understandably, the concept in question ascribes to the women merely a role of ‘incubator’ in the procreation of human beings, and such a subordinate role attributed to women in the process of procreation is bound to have social and political implications in their life.
   It is, therefore, only natural that Hinduism as such would attribute a subordinate role to the women in all spheres of human life. Subsequently, the Brahmin pundits, who had codified the rules of Hinduism, under the title of The Laws of Manu,85 asserted that ‘men must make their women dependent day and night’, because, as they maintained, ‘a woman is not fit for independence’.86
   Hinduism also prescribes the ways of keeping the women dependent on the men, by way of asserting that ‘a girl, a young woman, or even an old woman should not do anything independently, even in (her own) house. In childhood, a woman should be under her father’s control, in youth under her husband’s, and when her husband is dead, under her son’s. She should not have independence’. 87
   In matrimonial life, a Hindu woman is strictly advised to do nothing displeasing to the man: “A virtuous wife should never do anything displeasing to the husband who took her hand in marriage, when he is alive or dead…” 88
   Hinduism literally attributes to the husband the status of a god, while degrading the status of the wife to that of a handmaiden, to say the least. “A virtuous wife should constantly serve her husband like a god, even if he behaves badly, freely indulges his lust, and is devoid of any good qualities,” says the treatise. 89
   The treatises like the Upanishads and the Laws of Manu have been enjoying the status of holy scriptures among millions of Hindus for centuries now, while identical thoughts on women are there in the legal and political discourses of ancient India — the Arthasashtra by Kautilya, also known as Chanakya, being a glaring example.
   Kautilya, who is still proclaimed to have been ‘ancient India’s finest political strategist and thinker’ and his ‘brand of wisdom’ that are still considered ‘ageless and immutable’, crudely displays his attitude towards women by addressing the issues related to women ‘in the chapter on title to property’, in the first place. Then, he includes women ‘in the list of property, along with deposits and pledges’.90
   When the Arthasashtra considers women nothing but sheer property, it is only natural that they would not have any right to absolutely possess any property, other than mere ‘stridhana’ that consists of ‘gifts from family and dowry’ during marriage.91The orthodox tradition of ‘Hindu Law regards women as inherently incompetent to hold property’.92
   However, while maintaining lineage according to the paternal line is of crucial importance in patriarchy, Kautilya finds women merely machines to produce son/s for the family. “The aim of taking a wife is to beget sons,” says he, declaring that ‘the frustration of a woman’s fertile period is a violation of sacred duty’ and that ‘a woman shall not conceal her fertile period and a husband shall not fail in his duty to try to get a son during his wife’s fertile period’.93
   The machine image of the women is further evident when his Arthasashtra decrees that the husband is free to ‘take a second wife’, ‘without paying any compensation to the first’, ‘if a wife was barren for eight years or if she had borne only daughters over a twelve-year period’.94
   Still, the author of The Arthasashtra, Kautilya aka Chanakya, ‘desires’ the women to have the ‘qualities’ to ‘serve a man as a mother in the hours of dawn…as a sister during the day…and a perfect mistress to please him sexually when the day turns into night’. 95
   Kautilya aka Chanakya, also believes that ‘duplicity,…coquetry, deception, greed, profligacy, and quarrelsomeness are the natural characteristics of a woman’96, and therefore concludes that ‘sagacious people never act upon a woman’s advice’.
   He, then, directly invokes Hinduism’s male supremacy over women to make the wife unconditionally submit to the husband: “Even if a woman gives away everything that has been bestowed upon her, observes various fasts, lives a life of abstinence, and visits all the places of pilgrimage, she cannot become pure of heart, but she is definitely cleansed of all sins if she worships at the feet of her husband’.97
   Finally, Kautilya endorses ‘limited’ violence against women, particularly in the case of the wife’s failure to behave, by ‘slapping her behind three times with the hand, a rope or a bamboo cane’.98
   Islam, a religion organised much later than others in question, remains more sensitive than Judaism, Christianity and Hinduism to the interests of the women in many a way, especially in terms of enhancing her human dignity to some extent and providing her with the right to property. However, when it comes to the question of democratic equality between man and woman, Islam remains as patriarchal as the other ones.
   The Bible makes Eve, the woman, commit the ‘original sin’ of being ‘beguiled’ by the ‘serpent’ in the garden of Eden and eat the fruit of the forbidden tree first, and then pass the fruit on to Adam, the man, to eat.99 Subsequently God punished the woman and gave the man the authority to ‘rule over’ the woman.100
   But the Qur’an, on the other hand, does not solely blame the woman for the ‘fall of man’, nor does it portray pregnancy and childbirth as punishments for her. Rather, to the Qur’an both ‘Adam’ and his ‘wife’ are equally guilty of ignoring God’s instruction not to ‘approach’ the forbidden ‘tree’ in the Garden of Eden, and allowing ‘Satan’ to deceive them both. The expulsion from heaven to ‘earth’ was a punishment from God, which was equally applicable to both the man and the woman.101
   However, while the Qur’an recognises the importance of the equal rights of men and women in general, it never fails in loudly declaring its patriarchal nature.
   “And women shall have rights
   Similar to the rights
   Against them, according to what is equitable,” declares the Qur’an,102 without, however, failing to pronounce, and that too in the same breath:
   “But men have a degree
   (Of advantage) over them.”103
   The Qur’an unambiguously recognises the woman’s right to property, with absolute authority to dispose of her property at her will and convenience.
   “From what is left by parents
   And those nearest related
   There is a share for men
   And a share for women,
   Whether the property be small
   Or large — a determinate share,” says the Qur’an.104
   But a woman’s share of the property was decreed to have been half the property of a man.
   “…to the male,
   A portion equal to that
   Of two females …,” declares the Qur’an.105
   Notably, the Islamic scholars of theology find the undemocratic idea of a female member of a family inheriting half the property that a male member is eligible to inherit ‘justified’ on the ground that Islam does not assign a woman with any material responsibility in family life. But the idea of relieving women of material responsibilities is inspired by the patriarchal mindset that endorses, in the first place, the idea of a gendered social division of labour between men and women, which, in turn, endorses the idea of keeping the women captive within four walls to carry out typical household duties, depriving them of the opportunities to engage themselves, equally with men, in public life and achieve status equal to that of men in the social, political or economic spheres of human life.
   That Islam finds a woman worth only half a man, particularly in financial affairs outside home, is further evident in the Qur’anic instruction to men as regards finding witnesses to the written deals of ‘transactions involving future obligations’.
   “And if there are not two men,
   Then a man and two women,
   Such as you choose,
   For witnesses,” says the Qur’an.106
   Islam, like any other patriarchal religion, pre-supposes men’s natural supremacy over women, which finds obvious expression in a Qur’anic declaration:
   “Men are the protectors
   And maintainers of women,
   Because Allah has given
   The one more (strength)
   Than the other, and because
   They support them
   From their means.”107
   For Islam, ‘the righteous women are devoutly obedient’ to husbands,108and the Qur’an endorses the divine right of the husband to resort to ‘limited’ violence against the wife for any act of disobedience.
   “As to those women
   On whose part you fear
   Disloyalty and ill-conduct,
   Admonish them (first),
   (Next) refuse to share their beds,
   And (last) beat them (lightly),” says the Qur’an.109
   The brief almanac of the attitude that the world’s major religions have towards women unambiguously shows that they, despite their many positive roles in human history, are inherently incapable of equalising the democratic rights of women to that of men. But the fact remains that millions of people, both men and women, sincerely believe in, and remain committed to, the religious faiths in question, and have done so for centuries. The result is obvious: Millions of men and women of faith have internalised the belief that women are inferior to men, and that the women, therefore, should not be treated equally at any level of human activity — social, political or economic. So the people of faith naturally do not find any problem with a gendered social division of labour between men and women.
   Begum Roquiah, a pioneer of the movement for the democratic emancipation of women in the subcontinent, had, therefore, genuine reasons to be critical of religions. “…we (the women) have never been able to stand upright against slavery, primarily because, as it appears, whenever any of us has tried to assert her human dignity with her head high, the heavy weapons of religious scriptures have come down heavily on the head. …We have eventually embraced many an injustice…packaged in the holy form of religious instructions…The men, with a view to keeping us in the dark, have propagated that religious scriptures are the directives of God…Religion has eventually strengthened our chain of slavery; the men have been ruling over the women in the name of religion.”110
   Religion, which appears to be ‘the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feeling of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless circumstances’, thus eventually proves to be ‘the opium of the people’, at least for the women.
   “he abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is [therefore] the demand for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about their condition is a demand to give up a condition that requires illusion.”111
   Until the ‘demand’ is met, understandably, the religions would continue to serve as an effective ideological apparatus to produce and reproduce patriarchy in the interests of the undemocratic ruling classes.
   
   Education and patriarchy
   In the midst of the concert of all the apparatuses in question, “…One ideological State apparatus certainly has the dominant role, although hardly anyone lends an ear to its music: it is so silent! This is the School.”112 Or, in the broader sense of the term, the educational institutions — public and private.
   That the ruling classes, democratic or undemocratic, secular or non-secular, are well aware of the fact that the perpetuation of their political rule over the ruled classes depends primarily on their political success in exerting ideological hegemony over their subjects through educational institutions, became evident in two recent identical instances taking place in the two feuding countries of the world — the Islamic Republic of Iran and United States of America.
   In the first case, the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, vowed at a gathering of elite students in Tehran on September 5, 2006 ‘to cleanse schools and universities of liberal influence’ to restore the ‘values’ of the ‘Islamic revolution’ effected in 1979.113
   Eager to restore the ‘ideological purity of the days after the 1979 revolution’, Ahmadinejad underlined the need for ‘working together’ to change the ‘secular teaching regime that has dominated [the country] for 150 years’. Meanwhile, his government ‘forced some 40 professors at Tehran university’, believed to have been liberal thinkers, ‘into early retirement’ in June 2006.
   Notably, the leaders of the Islamist revolution sought to rid the universities of, under the general banner of the ‘cultural revolution’, what they deemed secular and Western influence. In a bid to bring higher education in line with the political ideology of the Islamist revolution, the Iranian government made fundamental changes in the university administration and curricula, not to mention dismissing many a professor. The universities were closed for nearly two years while effecting the non-secular changes in the academic syllabi.114
   In the other instance, a senior teacher of psychology at the University of New Hampshire, Professor William Woodward, came ‘under fire’ in August 2006 from the local political establishments, both Republican and Democratic, for his academic conviction that an university classroom is ‘an appropriate venue for exposing students to conflicting ideas about the American political context’.115
   The professor, while giving a course on political psychology, argued in the classroom that ‘what we learn in the mainstream is not the full story’. In this regard, he reportedly referred to the yet-to-be resolved controversy over the identities of the perpetrators of the heinous September 11, 2001 attack on the Twin Towers’.116
   Reacting to the professor’ academic view, the president of the New Hampshire Senate, Ted Gatsas, a Republican, said that the professor has the ‘right to free speech’ but it is ‘not appropriate’ to make such ‘free speech in a classroom with the taxpayers paying for it’, and suggested ‘disciplinary action against Prof Woodward’. The governor of the state, John Lynch, a Democrat, found the professor’s view an ‘offensive’ one and called on the university to ascertain Woodward’s ‘fitness for duty’.117
   Clearly, the ruling political establishments of both the countries, Iran and America, want their universities, public or private, to intellectually indoctrinate the students to dance to their respective official political tunes. In other words, the rulers are ruthlessly opposed to the idea of educational institutions generating knowledge that does not conform to their existing social, political and economic order. Bangladesh is no exception.
   The successive governments of Bangladesh have been claiming, over the last decade or so, that they have contributed substantially to the empowerment of the female citizens by way of spreading education among the women. The governments are apparently right, given the fact that the rate of enrolment of girl child to the primary schools is highest in the sub-continent with 86 per cent, as against 85 per cent in India and 50 per cent in Pakistan.118
   But schooling and education are not synonymous, in the first place, while measuring ‘education’ simply by ‘years of schooling’ is quite misleading. The important question that needs to be posed is what kind of education the girls are provided with by the schools — public and private. It is more necessary to do so when it comes to patriarchy.
   The political objective of the rulers of Bangladesh for spreading female education has been clearly patriarchal since the beginning: manufacturing consent among the girls to the patriarchal social relations that assign solely the women the household duties within the framework of a gendered social division of labour between men and women. The First Five Year Plan, adopted in 1973 by the first elected government of Bangladesh, underlined the importance of girls’ education. Why? The document says, “…the level of schooling of women determines the efficiency of household management. Educated mothers pay greater attention to nutrition, health and childcare than the uneducated [do].”119
   The state of public education has hardly changed after 36 years of the country’s independence. The expensive private education is also no better.
   The Saptagram, an NGO, ‘carried out a far-ranging research to find out whether any government or non-government organisation had issued any gender-oriented publication’, but it ‘could find none’.120
   The Saptagram then designed in the 1990s a book for the non-government school children, a chapter of which — adult education lessons to raise consciousness — was devoted to the adverse social, medical and economic impact of purdah on the women. At around that time, the mullahs put up political resistance against such educational curricula in some parts of the country, particularly in the rural areas, on the grounds that it was ‘making the girls shameless, too knowledgeable about their own bodies and un-Islamic legal rights’.121 Understandably, the patriarchal elite, particularly of rural Bangladesh, does not want the girls to develop the kind of consciousness through education that would question the patriarchal status quo.
   Notably, the number of the females in the school managing committees is so insignificant that the women have no scope for asserting their feminist voice, if there is any, in selecting the books for the students. Notably, only 3.4 per cent of the members of the managing committees in the non-government secondary schools are female,122 although almost all the schools in the rural areas are co-educational.
   While the general school curricula in Bangladesh hardly help raise any question against patriarchy in the minds of the students, female or male, there is an Indian example of how the patriarchal political authorities can manipulate school curricula to indoctrinate the students in the patriarchal views of life, particularly regarding their attitude towards women.
   The authorities of India’s western state of Rajasthan recently got a textbook for the 14-year-olds, questioning the human dignity of the women in general. The textbook reportedly claims that the ‘housewives and donkeys are much the same except that the beasts of burden are better companions, complain less and are more loyal’.123
   “ey is like a housewife. In fact, the donkey is a shade better, for while the housewife may sometimes complain and walk off to her parents’ home, you’ll never catch the donkey being disloyal to his master,” the Times of India quoted the Hindi book.
   However, as the female political activists protested against such a humiliating portrayal of women in the school textbook by the state’s Hindu fundamentalist government of the Bharatiya Janata Party, a state education official reportedly defended the vulgar comparison by simply saying that ‘the textbook was just an attempt at making school lessons humorous’!124
   Education in general, and female education in particular, can be an agent of positive changes only when the curricula enable the students, both male and female, to identify various causes of the oppression and exploitation of the women on the one hand, and provide them with the right intellectual tools to politically fight against those causes to secure their democratic emancipation on the other. But the patriarchal political authorities are always there to prevent any such democratic effort.
   However, it is important to note that the use of education systems for patriarchal political purposes is neither confined to junior schools nor is it a new phenomenon in the twenty-first century. Rather many so-called ‘scientific discoveries’, made under the auspices of great universities, have been politically used to promote the patriarchal notion of the natural superiority of man over woman.
   During the sixteenth century, the theory of female passivity in reproduction became well established. Many a ‘scientist’ found the female ‘less perfect’ than the male on the ground that ‘her genitalia did not emerge externally’ and her ‘semen’ was ‘imperfect’. Most sixteenth-century writers sided with Aristotle’s theory that the female provided only the matter, while the active principle was attributed to the male semen. Most texts supported the ancient idea that the male embryo was twice as hot and developed twice as quickly as the female.125
   Hieronymous Fabricius argued in his ‘Embryological Treatises’ in 1621 that ‘the sperm never reached the egg. It merely vivified it by an immaterial fecundative faculty. As sole agent and efficient cause, it imparted quality to the egg. The female supplied the nutriment and warmth for the embryo’s development.’
   Thus the theory of man as inseminator and woman as incubator formed the prevailing sexual ideology of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
   William Harvey, who discovered the blood circulation system in animals in 1628, also worked on biological reproduction in the poultry and deer. But he frequently compared the animal reproductive process with that of human reproduction.
   Harvey argued that the “male is more excellent as an efficient cause than the female. A hen’s egg obtained perfection only when fertilised by the male ‘in virtue of an authority...or power required of the cock...Among animals where the sexes are distinct, matters are so arranged that since the female alone is inadequate to engender an embryo and to nourish and protect the young, a male is associated with her by nature, as the superior and more worthy progenitor, as the consort of her labour and the means of supplying her deficiencies”.126
   Clearly, Harvey’s theories fall in line with the tradition of male superiority, rather than the equality of male-female principals in reproduction.
   “Mid-seventeenth-century natural philosophers continued the tradition of male superiority in generation, maintaining that the soul itself was distributed through the male lineage. Descartes believed that the egg was impregnated by the power of the male semen, which endowed it with the soul…
   “As late as 1661, Anthony Everard still held that the male semen contributed the spiritual element and the mother the matter. Everard argued that the foetus was formed from the union of the male and female seminal spirits. The ‘female semen’, as such, did not contribute to generation, while the masculine semen, acting only as an efficient cause, did not contribute anything material.”127
   The use of such ‘scientific discoveries’ as ideological apparatuses for subjugating women was random even in the nineteenth century.
   ‘Variability’, the basis for evolutionary progress in Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, was correlated with a greater spread of physical variations in males. There were scientists who enthusiastically compared male and female cranial sizes and brain parts in their patriarchal attempts to demonstrate the existence of physical differences between men and women to explain ‘female intellectual inferiority’.
   There also appeared Sigmund Freud with his anti-women psycho-analytical theories of ‘castration complex’ and ‘penis envy’ that continued to enormously influence almost all the branches of social science for about a century.
   “The castration complex and penis envy concepts, two of the most basic ideals in his whole thinking, are postulated on the assumption that women are biologically inferior to men.”128 For Freud, a woman ‘is merely an homme manqué, a man with something missing’.
   “Freud’s ideas about women’s sexuality have been literally proven wrong.”129 But his so-called ‘discoveries’ provided the patriarchal intelligentsia with a very effective ideological state apparatus of modern times against the potential democratic emancipation of women on the basis of equality with men.
   That Freud’s so-called scientific discovery was driven by his personal belief in the patriarchal political ideology is evident from a letter that he wrote, in November 1883, to express his reservations about Stuart Mill’s idea of the equality of men and women.
   “It is really a stillborn thought to send women into the struggle for existence exactly as man…I believe that all reforming action in law and education would break down in front of the fact that, long before the age at which a man can earn a position in society, nature has determined woman’s destiny through beauty, charm, and sweetness. Law and custom have much to give women what has been withheld from them, but the position of women will surely be what it is: in youth an adored darling and in mature years a loved wife.”130 The contents of the latter clearly suggests that Freud was a prisoner of Victorian social psychology, incapable of endorsing an effective public life for woman, while his patriarchal mindset was quite active in analysing his psycho-analytical data. It was, therefore, only natural for him to find women biologically inferior to men.
   Even in the twentieth century, hormonal differences between men and women were used to imply ‘abnormal levels of androgen in women who displayed high intelligence, competitive behaviour, leadership, and executive ability’, suggesting clearly that women with the normal level of androgen are intellectually inferior to men.
   
   Emancipation of women: what is to be done?
   The ‘democratic’ system, to be really democratic, has to base itself on the core democratic principle of equality between men and women, in the first place. For a democratic struggle to really succeed, the forces of democracy will therefore need to destroy all forms of patriarchy, without waiting for the monster to get destroyed ‘automatically’, as a certain school of thought has preached in the past, in the next phase of history called socialism.
   One having a couple of adequate eyes hardly needs to read the Communist Manifesto to discover exploitation of the poor by the rich in any country of the contemporary world — let alone the countries like Bangladesh where the forms of the exploitation remain very crude. But patriarchy is not the kind of problem which can simply be explained and addressed by political ideologies that promise women a golden future after the ousting capitalist classes from state power and replacing the exploitative capitalist state-machinery with a socialist one.131
   Patriarchy impedes the process of the growth of a woman as a ‘sovereign individual’ with all her inherent human potential, cutting across all classes — the rich and the poor. In an upper-class family, patriarchy practically relegates the so-called upper-class women to the state of a proletarian in terms of powerlessness. To look at the phenomenon from the caste point of view, one can also say that patriarchy in a higher caste family relegates the so-called higher caste women to the state of a Sudra. The struggle for the democratic emancipation of women, therefore, remains a struggle for women in general — rich and poor, Brahmin or Sudra.
   And the problem of patriarchy has to be approached politically, because the relationship between the sexes is a political one with obvious social and economic implications in terms of the exercise of power over one group by the other. It is like ‘the relationship between the races…a political one which involves the general control of one collectivity, defined by birth, over another collectivity, also defined by birth’.132 In all contemporary political systems of the today, men govern women in every sphere of life - be it familial, social or economic, primarily by birthright. This can by no means be called democracy.
   Democracy does not believe in governance by ‘birthright’, rather it is committed to the concept of governance by ‘consent’ – consent of the citizens irrespective of their gender, religion or class. Hence, the struggle against patriarchy no longer remains mere a struggle of the women, although women are the sole victims of patriarchy. The struggle against patriarchy thus becomes a struggle of both the men and the women who believe in the democratic way of life, based on the equality of men and women in all social, cultural, political and economic activities — private or public.
   The political objective of such a democratic movement has to be sharing of political power and economic resources equally between the male and female citizens, doing away with the gendered social division of labour between men and women at all levels, including the family, reformulation of the patriarchal education curricula, etc. For a success in this political struggle, the democratic forces would require to continuously expose to the public the undemocratic components inherent in the ideological apparatuses of the patriarchal state on the one hand, and making all out efforts to develop/build up democratic ideological apparatuses of their own to perpetually counter the patriarchal cultural hegemony in the society at large.
   Understandably, men and women committed to democratic causes have to work shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand, to take such a democratic struggle to victory.
   
   End notes
   1. The BNP-led four-party alliance government had the bill, providing reserved seats for women in parliament, enacted in May 2004, in clear breach of its 2001 electoral pledge of introducing the provision for direct elections to the reserved seats for women.
   2. Statistical Report, 8th Parliament Election [held in October 1, 2001], Election Commission Secretariat, Dhaka, April 2002,
   p. 1.
   3. Ibid.
   4.That the electorates in general do not have a problem with the female candidates is evident in the fact that Khaleda won all the five seats of parliament that she contested for and Hasina won all but one seat.
   5. Source: The Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development, the government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh.
   6. Source: Cabinet Division, the government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh.
   7. Source: The ministry of establishment, the Government of the Peoples Republic of Bangladesh. The figures are updated as of September, 2006.
   8. Source: The Ministry of Establishment, the Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh. The figures are updated as of August, 2006.
   9. Source: The Ministry of Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs. The figures are updated as of September 2006.
   10. Source: The headquarters of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party in Dhaka. The figures are updated until August, 2006.
   11. Source: The headquarters of the Bangladesh Awami League in Dhaka. The figures are updated until August 2006.
   12. Statistical Report, 8th Parliament Election [held in October 1, 2001], op-cit, p.1.
   13. Human Development Report, 2005, UNDP, New York, USA. The GEM measures political as well as economic participation and decision-making power, and power over economic resources. Notably, higher numbers indicate poorer performance.
   14. The Daily Star, Dhaka, Bangladesh, January 3, 2000.
   15. The Daily Star, January 3, 2000.
   16. Article 11, The Constitution of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, Ministry of Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs, Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, 2000.
   17. Article 28, Ibid.
   18. Article 19, Ibid.
   19. The Daily Star, January 22, 2000.
   20. Ibid.
   21. Article 32, The Constitution of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, op-cit.
   22. Article 28, Ibid.
   23. New Age, Dhaka, Bangladesh, March 20, 2006.
   24. The Daily Star, January 26, 2000.
   25. Ibid.
   26. Ibid.
   27. Article 13, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, 1979.
   28. John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women, Three Essays by John Stuart Mill, Oxford University Press, London, 1966, p. 465.
   29. Report on Labour Force Survey, 2002-2003, Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, Ministry of Planning, Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh.
   30. Dr. Badiul Alam Majumder, global vice-president and country director of Hunger Project. Social Status of the Women in Bangladesh, its Consequence and Our Future Responsibilities, a research paper presented at a seminar in Dhaka on April 30, 2005.)
   31. A group of American feminists, like Maria Rosa Dallacosta and Selma James, argued in the early 1970s that home is obviously an economically productive and significant workplace, an extension of the actual factory, because the house work serves to ‘reproduce the labour power’ for the industries, which is an essential precondition for the survival and perpetuation of the capitalist economic order. The feminist group in question used to argue that the male worker would hardly be in shape to punch in for his shift in the factory, if some woman had not fed him, laundered his clothes, and cared for the children who were ‘his contribution’ to the next generation of industrial workers. If the home is thus considered a ‘quasi industrial work place staffed by women’ for the ultimate benefit of the capitalists, then the demand like ‘wage for housework’ is a legitimate slogan.
    32.Naila Kabeer, cited in a study called Women in Labour Market: Impact and Implications of Labour Laws, Ministry of Women and Children Affairs, Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, 2003, p. 25.
   33. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics, Touchstone Edition, New York, 1990, p. 35.
   34. Neluka Silva, The Gendered Nation, Sage Publications, New Delhi, India, 2004,p. 172.
   35.Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, Everyman’s Library, London, 1968, P. 12.
   36. Ibid., p. 13.
   37. Ibid., p. 31.
   38. Women in Revolutionary Paris 1789-1795: Selected Documents Translated with Notes and Commentary’ by Daline Gay Levy, Harriet Branson Applewhite and Mary Durham Johnson, University of Illinois, Urbana, 1979, pp. 87-96.
   39. Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile, translated by Barbara Foxley, JM Dent and Sons Ltd, London, 1961, p. 324.
   40. Ibid., p. 322.
   41. Ibid., p. 334.
   42. Ibid., p. 325.
   43. Ibid., p. 328
   44. The Unanimous Declaration of Independence by the Thirteen United States of America on July 4, 1776.
   45. The 14th amendment to the US Constitution.
   46. http://www.lib.rochester.edu/index.cfm ?page =1800, accessed on October 5, 2006.
   47. Ibid.
   48. Ibid.
   49. John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women in Three Essays by John Stuart Mill, Oxford University Press, London, 1966, p. 427.
   50. Ibid., p. 485.
   51. Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals, George Allen & Unwin Ltd, London, twelfth impression, 1958, p. 66. British Representation of the People Act grants suffrage to women over 30 and to most men over 21 in February 1918.
   52. Agence France-Presse , Tokyo, September 6, 2007.
   53. Ibid., Tokyo, September 7, 2006.
   54. Ibid.
   55. Ibid.
   56. New Age, Dhaka, Bangladesh, July 5, 2004.
   57. Ibid., July 2, 2004.
   58. Ibid., July 3, 2004.
   59. The Daily Star January 23, 2003.
   60.New Age, May 4, 2003.
   61. Ibid., August 17, 2004.
    62. Prothom Alo, Dhaka, Bangladesh, July 20, 2000. Saris and bangles are the traditional outfit and ornament used by Bangladeshi women.
   63. Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes towards an Investigation’, The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, WW Norton and Company, New York, First Edition, 2001, p. 1489.
   64. Ibid.
   65. Report of the Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey, 2004.
   66. http://jn.nutrition.org/cgi/content/full /129/11/2021, accessed on October 6, 2006.
   67. Education Watch (report), 2005, styled ‘The State of Secondary Education: Progress and Challenges, Campaign for Popular Education’ (CAMPE), Bangladesh, Dhaka, 2006 p.122.
   68.Golam Mortoza, Fazle Hasan Abed of BRAC (BRAC: The Vision of Fazle Hasan Abed), Mowla Brothers, Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2006, p. 49.
   69. Barbara Ehrenreich, ‘Maid to Order’, Harper’s Magazine, Vol. 300, No.1799, New York, USA, April 2000.
   70.Kate Millett, op-cit, p. 35.
   71.Judaism, the monotheistic religion preached by Moses, however, is an exception, because the Judaic God had ‘made a covenant’ only with the Jewish people, and promised them, and them only, ‘a land flowing with milk and honey’ beyond Egypt. Moses’ God is clearly a ‘national god’, not an international one as that of Jesus or Muhammad. He promised to bring the followers of Moses ‘out of the affliction of Egypt unto the land of the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Perriz-zites, and the Hivitites, and the Jebusites…’ [The Old Testament, Exodus 3:17] and pledged that He ‘By little and little…will drive them out from before the people of Moses, ‘until thou be increased, and inherit the land’. (The Old Testament, Exodus 22:30)
   Notably, David Ben Gurion, the first Israeli Prime Minister, had once pointed out the political implications of the difference between the Judaic God and the God of Islam by way of making a politico-religious confession: ‘If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs.’ (Quoted in Nahum Goldmann, Le Paraddoxe Juif [The Jewish Paradox, pp. 121-122.) Besides, Golda Meir, former Israeli prime minister, also invoked the Jewish God of the Old Testament to justify Israel’s forcible occupation of Arab lands, particularly those of the Palestinians, saying: ‘This country (Israel) exists as the fulfillment of a promise made by God Himself. It would be ridiculous to ask it to account for its legitimacy.’ Golda Meir, Le Monde, October 15, 1971.)
   72. Karl Marx, ‘Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction in Selected Writings’, edited by David Mclellan, Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 64.
   73. The Old Testament, Genesis 2: 21-23.
   74. Ibid., Genesis 3: 12-13.
    75. Ibid., Genesis 3:16).
   76. Betty Friedan, ‘The Feminine Mystique’, WW Norton and Company, New York and London, 2001, p. 108.
   77. Ibid.
   78. Bertrand Russell, ‘Marriage and Morals’, George Allen & Unwin Ltd, London, twelfth impression, 1958, p. 22.
   79. The first epistle of Paul, the apostle to the Corinthians, 11:3-4.
   80. Ibid, 11: 8-9.
   81.The epistle of Paul the apostle to the Ephesians, 5: 22-24.
   82.The first epistle of Paul the apostle to Timothy, 2:9-14.
   83.Verse 3, Section 3, Part I, Aitareya Upanishad, The Upanishads, translated by Eknath Easwaran, Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, New Delhi, India, 1996, p. 127.
   84.Verse 1, Section 1, Part II, Ibid., 1996, pp. 128-129.
   85. An ancient text of Hinduism, which is a compilation of 2,685 verses on topics ‘apparently varied’ but ‘actually intimately interrelated in Hindu thought’, presents ‘an encompassing representation of life in the world’ as to ‘how it is, and how it should be lived’.
   Manu is said to have become by, and remained since, the ‘early centuries of the Common Era, the standard source of authority in the orthodox tradition for that centerpiece of Hinduism, …social and religious duties tied to class and stage of life’.
   86. Verse 3, Chapter 9, The Laws of Manu, p. 115, Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, New Delhi, India, 1996, p. 115.
   87. Verses 147 and 148, Chapter 5, Ibid., p. 115.
   88. Verse 156, Chapter 9, Ibid, p. 197.
   89. Verse 154, Chapter 5, Ibid., p. 115.
   90. Kautilya, Arthasashtra, edited, rearranged, translated and introduced by LN Rangarajan, Penguin Books, New Delhi, India, 1992, p. 71.
   91. Ibid., p. 397.
   92. The Principles of Hindu Law, Sree Mridul Kanti Rakshit, Kamrul Book House, Dhaka, fifth edition, 2005, p. 458.
   93. Ibid., p. 65.
   94. Ibid, pp. 65-66.
   95. Pundit Ashwani Sharma, Chanakya: His Teachings and Advice, Jaico Publishing House, Mumbai, India, Sixth Jaico Impression, 2005,p. 6.
   96. Ibid, pp. 3-4.
   97. Ibid, p. 3.
   98.Kautilya, op cit, p. 400.
   99. The Old Testament, Genesis 3: 12-13.
   100. Ibid., Genesis 3:16.
   101. Verse 35-36, Section 4, Surah 2: Al Baquarah, ‘The Meanings of The Holy Qur’an, Text, Translation and Commentary’ by Abdullah Yusuf Ali, Kitab Bhavan, New Delhi-2, India, 1997, pp. 25-26. Also in Verses 19-25, Section 2: Surah Al A‘raf, Ibid, pp. 348-350.
   102.Verse 228, Section 28, Surah 2: Al Baquarah, Ibid., p. 92.
   103. Ibid.
   104. 104. Verse 7, Section 1, Surah 4: Al Nisa, Ibid., p. 185.
   That the recognition of the woman’s right to property with absolute authority to dispose of it is a revolutionary idea, particularly given the time when the Qur’an came into existence, can be well understood from the fact that the married women of even revolutionary France achieved legal recognition of their eligibility to contract as late as 1938, and still then they used to require their husbands’ permission before they could dispose of their private property.
   105. Verse 11, Section 2, Surah 4: Al Nisa, Ibid., p. 186.
   106.Verse 282, Section 39, Surah 2: Al Baquarah, Ibid., pp. 117-18.
   107. Verse 34, Section 6, Surah 4: Al Nisa, Ibid., p. 195.
   108. Ibid.
   109.Verse 34, Section 6, Surah 4: Al Nisa, Ibid., p. 195.
   110. Begum Rokeya Shakhwat Hossain (1880-1932), ‘Stree Jatir Abanati’ (Degradation of the Women) in the Rokeya Shakhwat Hossain Rachana Sangkalan (collection of essays), edited by Dr Nilima Ibrahim Jatiya Sahitya Prokashani, Dhaka, 1992, pp. 12-13.
   111. Karl Marx, op cit, p. 64.
   112. Louis Althussere, op- cit, p.1494.
   113. Agence France-Presse, Tehran, September 5, 2006.
   114. Ibid.
   115. Reuters, Boston, September 1, 2006.
   116. Notably, a group of American academics called ‘Scholars for 9/11 Truth’ has long been contesting the White House’s official claim that the mindless destruction was carried out by the Islamist group called al-Qaeda. Many a member of the group rather believes that certain US intelligence agencies were behind the attack, designed to create the pretext for Anglo-American invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.
   117. Ibid.
   118. Human Development Report – 2005 Untied Nations Development Programme (UNDP), New York, USA, p. 309.
   119. First Five Year Plan, The Ministry of Planning, The Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, 1973, p. 479.
   120. Elora Shehabuddin, ‘Development Revisited: A Critical Analysis of the Status of Women in Bangladesh’, Journal of Bangladesh Studies, Volume 6, No 1 & 2, The Pennsylvania State University at Erie, Pennsylvania, USA, 2004, pp. 1-19.
   121. Ibid.
   122. Education Watch (report), 2005, styled ‘The State of Secondary Education: Progress and Challenges, Campaign for Popular Education’ (CAMPE), Bangladesh, Dhaka, 2006. p. 123.
   123. Times of India, New Delhi, April 4, 2006. Also, Agence France-Presse, New Delhi, India, April 4, 2006.
   124. Ibid.
   125. Carolyn Merchant, ‘The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution’, HarperSanFrancisco, First Harper & Row Paperback Edition, New York, USA, 1983, p. 157.
   126. Ibid., p. 158.
   127. Ibid. p. 162.
   128. Clara Thompson, ‘Psychoanalysis: Evaluation and Development’, New York, USA, 1950, p. 133.
   129. Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex : The Case For Feminist Revolution, Batman Books, New York, USA, 1971, p. 42.
   130. Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, New York, 1953, Vol. 1, p. 176. Also quoted in Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, WW Norton and Company, New York and London, 2001, pp. 110-111.
   131. The ‘socialist’ societies of the now defunct United Soviet Socialist Republic could not ensure the democratic equality of men and women, particularly in terms of destroying the gendered social division of labour between male and female citizens. The experience of Chinese women under the prolonged rule of its communist party is no different.
   132. Kate Millett, op-cit, p. 25.