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AYESHA KHANAM
‘Women’s role in ’71 have been minimised to victims of rape’
by NS Nisha
AT THE age of 24, Ayesha Khanam, a post-graduate student and vice-president of the Rokeya Hall student section committee as well as the Bangladesh Student Union central committee, was amongst the hundreds of female students who took part in a procession, led by Sufia Kamal, demanding the independence of Bangladesh on March 13, 1971.
She had already been engaged in forming ‘women struggle committees’ in various parts of the city and had distributed leaflets and given motivational speeches on the necessity of war. At the same time, Ayesha, along with many of her contemporaries, was undergoing regular firearms training, with wooden rifles, on the Dhaka University playground.
‘March 1 to 25 was the best time of my life when I was dedicating every moment for the freedom of my country,’ says Ayesha, now general secretary of the Bangladesh Mahila Parishad. ‘We were threatened with murder, arson, rape, gang rape and torture but we were not afraid.’
On March 25, Ayesha and a friend were crossing Hatirpool when they were asked by an acquaintance they ran into to hurry back home as the pool (bridge) in the area had been barricaded; they were told that the situation was unpredictable. She took shelter at her friend Kazi Rokeya Sultana’s residence. ‘We could not sleep the whole night. Sounds of bullets pierced our ears,’ Ayesha recalls.
When the curfew was lifted on March 27, Ayesha along with her friend Munira Akhter stepped out of the house and went towards the statistics department at Dhaka University. ‘On our way, at the railway line of New Market, we discovered burnt corpses of women and children. It was a horrible sight. We rushed to Rokeya Hall and found that our guard Nomida had been killed and supervisor Jahanara had been beaten up.’
Enraged, humiliated, and vowing to avenge the atrocity, Ayesha left Dhaka, without even contacting her parents, and along with Matiur Rahman and Maleka Begum reached Agartala, the Indian town bordering Bangladesh around May.
At Agartala, she did a short course on nursing at the Shandhi Ballav hospital and later worked in mobile hospitals where she nursed freedom-fighters, gave speeches at Bangladesh Betar and carried out motivational work at transit camps.
‘Hundreds of women like me were active during the war,’ she says. ‘I am extremely disappointed and disgusted that women’s role in, and contribution to, the war has been minimised as victims of rape or indirect source of inspiration to their husbands and sons.’
‘Women had active participation – several fought on the battlefield and hundreds of others took training. We had won our independence before women could fully plunge themselves into the war,’ she says.
Thirty-seven years after the independence war, Ayesha is disappointed by the fate of ordinary Bangladeshis, especially her own kind, women.
‘Have the lives of women improved? Why are women still suffering from violence and loathsome aggression at the hands of men while society is continuously trying to keep them imprisoned at homes or under a veil?’ she asks.
‘Many of the people whom we fought against in the war of independence – members of Al-Badar, Al-Shams and Rajakars – are the same people who today oppose female education, coeducation, birth control, and women working outside home and taking part in politics. But when Bangladeshi women become victims of rape, acid violence, torture and murder for dowry, they remain silent and show no opposition,’ she laments.
‘Across the country, through fatwas, they have provoked and increased torture and murder of women in the past 37 years. All this is happening because women in this male-dominated society are insecure and helpless without access to property and resources,’ she says referring to the recent controversy over the exclusion of inheritance rights from the freshly drafted women’s policy by the present government. ‘We speak of equal rights and democracy but are also denying women access to resources. It is about time we set the record straight.’
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Gendered independence