By Naila Zaman Khan

WOMEN’S movement in Bangladesh is a chronicle of relentless struggle and resistance, individually and collectively, which has gone from strength to strength to put thousands visibly negotiating the streets of cities, towns, and village markets at the turn of this century. It is a story of silent deaths, voiceless cries, and inhuman sacrifices of courageous women, our heroes, the brave of heart, long gone but alive in spirit in every breath we take of our land. It is also a history strewn with betrayals and treachery, most often than not by patriarchal forces and the rich elite, often in collusion with each other. However, be she of the privileged classes or a subaltern, the Bangladeshi woman has continued relentlessly to fight for her rights.
   The Bangladeshi peasant woman has probably the longest history of struggle. One has to remember the sacrifices of the Santhal women in Nachol, Rajshahi, as part of the Tebhaga Anodlan, against the British and subsequently Pakistani exploitation of landless peasants, where Ila Mitra gave courageous leadership and was ultimately captured by the Pakistani police in 1948, and then beaten, raped and tortured. One might recall the image of a peasant woman named Basanti, who became the living representation of the famine of 1974. While the famine was raging in the country the elite remained nonplussed ‘eating cakes’ and got a reality bite when her stark image hit the headlines of all the national dailies. A poor and starving peasant woman had struck into the heart of the ruling polity yet again. The anti-chingri gher (shrimp farm) movement in the late 1980s is another example of the landless peasantry or those driven out of their land for cultivation of shrimp rising to fight against hired thugs and goons of the commercial business sector for their land. Kuranamoyee Sardar, one of the main leaders of the movement, was shot dead by hired goons of the shrimp traders in 1979. Every year thousands of villagers gather to commemorate her killing, which still remains untried and the killers remain at large due to continuing patronage by ‘big money.’
   As recently as in 2005 women participated alongside men to protest against the lack of power and electricity at Kansat which seriously hampered cultivation and cropping. Several hundred people were rounded up by the police and several villages put under sharp administrative vigilance, all expressions of state repression towards a populace fighting for their fundamental rights of survival and livelihood in a largely agrarian economy. In the same year women were an integral part of the Phulbari protest against the proposed open-pit mines contract between Asia Energy, a UK based multinational company, and the government. Underhand dealings between big international companies and the powers-that-be still continue at the cost of the lives of thousands and the destruction of the pristine rural environment. But it is the image of the protesting women that continues to persist most effectively as the voice of resistance. Sadly enough, mainstream political parties, the elite of society, and even the organised women’s forums have hardly paid any attention to or joined these movements.
   The past decade has seen the emergence of the women workers’ movement in the readymade garment sector against the inhuman working hours, absence of holidays, gross underpayment of wages, arbitrary hiring and firing by male supervisors, not to mention sexual harassments by these hired whips, deplorable work and living conditions, inappropriately built factory building that pushes females workers to death in cases of fire, and many other covert and overt forms of ‘female cheap labour’ exploitation. At the same time, obscene accumulation of wealth by the garment factory owners has increasingly contributed to the sharpening of worker-owner divide. It is no wonder that the protest erupted into a mass movement in 2006. Till today most of the garment workers, over 80 per cent of whom are women, are not being paid the minimum wages, even according to the tripartite agreement signed between the government, factory owners and the workers. Besides, the patriarchal forces in the trade unions have marginalised women during formal negotiations, enabling the elite to rule by keeping the division among workers alive. Meanwhile, the elite, in collusion with the state apparatus, continues to cash in on the women’s sweat and blood, unhindered by the absence of any political ideology of equity, and political failure to wrestle social responsibility out of the state in this regard in a ‘free’ and ‘globalised’ market economy. Nonetheless, there are increasing instances of the women garment workers taking to the street to voice their demands; and owners are hard-put to prove how ‘compliant’ they are to market regulations (but not, ironically, to the demands of the workers).
   At the turn of the twentieth century we have Roquiah Sakhawat, a woman from the rich elite married into wealth, who silently went about bringing girls out of purdah in Calcutta into formal schooling and education through the school she established. The list of alumni of Sakhawat Memorial School reads like a list of luminaries to the cause of women’s emancipation of the gentrified classes in the past century and includes such names as Nurjahan Begum, Professor Kulsum Huda, Dr Hosna Banu Khanum, Professor Sultana Sarwatara Zaman, Professor Rawshan Ara Rahman, Dr Latifa Akhand, Dr Shamsunnahar, Anwara Bahar, Bilquis Nasiruddin, Zohra Khatun, Tuba Khanam, Dilafroze Huq, Mahemunir Ahmed, Nawshaba Khatun, Maliha Khatun and many others. Although not from the same school Sufia Kamal, Anwara Mansur, Badurunnessa Ahmed also belong to the same tradition of women; and Roquiah’s futuristic writings still remains an inspirational ‘must read’ for democratically-oriented men and women alike. While professional development continued in the able hands of these enlightened women, not much of it reached the vast poor majority residing in distant villages and not-so-distant urban slums, except for the sacrifices of a few women who ventured out with bravado and idealism. Rokeya Rahman Kabir, a firebrand of a woman in her times, was probably the first of them to organise rural women’s economic advancement through cooperatives in Faridpur from the mid-1970s, when ‘donor financing’ and ‘donor-driven agendas’ were not common words. Her niece Khushi Kabir courageously followed in her footsteps a decade later but by then donor policies had taken a firm footing with the ‘us’ (the donors and their local partners) vs. ‘them’ (the beneficiaries) paradigm firmly in place.
   The state’s repression of the women’s movement has, however, never been as heinous as it has in the field of political empowerment. The long struggle for more women’s seats in parliament through direct elections – to both general and reserved seats – has repeatedly been undermined by the political patriarchy of the rich. Organised women’s forums such as Mahila Parishad, Oikkoboddho Nari Samaj (from mid-1980s to mid-1990s) and Sammilita Nari Samaj (born in 1995 through the protest of Yasmeen’s death vide infra) have staged countless demonstrations for this cause. It is to the credit of the women’s movement that has led to the inclusion of clauses pledging increase in the number of reserved seats for women in parliament in the political mandates of the Awami League and the Bangladesh National Party, the two major political players, in the past three national elections. However, women should have realised that the saying ‘morning shows the day’ would be true for the outcome of their struggles, as only a couple of women got nominations to contest in all three parliamentary polls. Swallowing this humiliation, their participation as voters has been exemplary and a reflection of their hope for political emancipation. But, indeed, that was not to be. In all the three elections, women were betrayed by patriarchal forces within these parties who felt too threatened to allow women’s inclusion in the national parliament.
   In local government, too, patriarchal forces have been active in trying to disempower elected women members of union parishads. Women members of the Khulna City Corporation filed a law suit to protest against a KCC circular disallowing women from allotting food grains in the vulnerable group feeding programme and also from being accepted as signatories as notaries of the public. The case went to the High Court and a positive judgement was passed favouring the women members of the city corporation.
   Another case, filed with the High Court in 2003, however, did not eventually produce a positive result although initially it showed some promise. In the case, a group of women fighting against gender discrimination challenged the constitutional amendments seeking to nominate women for the reserved seats in violation of the public pledges that the political parties involved made earlier. The petitioners got the High Court rule, and the government was served a show-cause notice. But the Supreme Court eventually quashed the petition. Speculations have it that there was political arm-twisting of the highest court by the law ministry of the time.
   Today we are an independent nation. But this freedom came after over a century of struggle, in which women played a crucial role, and at a cost of innumerable lives. One cannot help but recall how Pritilata Waddar, a student of Eden Girls College and hailing from Chittagong, during the Ostragar Lunthon Movement in 1934 attempted to shoot the then British DC of Chittagon in the Chittagong Club. After being shot down in the leg she self-terminated herself with potassium cyanide. Many like her gave their lives to fight British occupation; and hundreds of women were exiled into the Andaman for ‘acts of treason’ by the British government. Subsequently, the anti-Pakistan movement started fermenting from the early-1950s, finding new spirit after the 1952 killing of four students by the Pakistanis. Nadira Begum’s escape from police arrest by unveiling her sari is a story legends are made of and is inspirational for women students even today. Sculptor Novera Ahmed’s contribution to the designing of the Central Shaheed Minar, a monument of protest which crosses all social class divides, still remains unacknowledged by the state. Matia Chowdhury’s fiery speeches as a Dhaka University student during the anti-Pakistani movement, interspersed with her arrests by the Pakistani police, made her the ‘Agni Konya’ that legends are made of. To her credit she continues to protest, in her own unique manner, for political rights and freedom.
   The campuses of Bangladesh, therefore, have a rich history of women rallying for their rights which can be traced till the present times. In the mid-1980s students of Roquiah Hall protested against the ‘Shandhyo Ain’ where a law was passed for all residents to return to the halls by 6:00pm when the gates would be ‘locked.’ This is reminiscent of a jailhouse, not unlike the patriarchal and feudal ‘bashini’ about which Roquiah so graphically written about a century ago. As one of the successes of the protest, the law was finally changed under pressure of the students’ movement, and still holds good. Women students also came out in droves during the anti-Ershad movement in 1990. Unfortunately, most of these movements which concentrated on the establishment of fundamental rights of women students were usurped by partisan student politics. This became blatant when parties aligned themselves with rapists within the Jahangirnagar University campus in 1999. Nonetheless, the authorities were forced to expel the rapists at the demand of the general students. This incident, and the incident of the molestation of Badhon during the New Year’s Eve celebrations and subsequent protest, has been exemplary in allowing women to move freely within campuses. The last protest of women students in August 2007 against the presence of the military on the campus is yet another sign of dissent of women for the authorities, which needs to be pondered over.
   More women embraced martyrdom and paid the highest price, as never before, as during the liberation of Bangladesh in 1971. Bir Protik Taramon Bibi, an armed soldier of the war, is one example of countless and un-recounted acts of heroism. On the one hand women fought with or without arms and on the other they were killed, raped and humiliated by the Pakistani army in every city, township and village of the country. Their patriarchal male protectors could not protect them from this humiliation. These ‘birangonas’, as Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib later euphemistically named them, remained silent, unheeded, marginalised and banished from society. Movements such as those led by Shaheed Janani Jahanara Imam have failed to bring the perpetrators of these crimes against humanity by the razakars to justice. In fact, the elite has re-established into the present society war criminals such as Ghulam Azam, Motiur Rahman Nizami and countless others, a comprehensive list of whose names can be found in the compilation ‘Ekattorer Ghatok Dalal Ke Kothay’. The fight against social, economic and religious dogmas, patriarchy and the affluent elite thus remains for the present and future generations of women to carry on.
   Having walked a long path of struggle and resistance Bangladeshi women need to reflect upon the journey ahead and the paths open to it. They need to rally around certain fundamental issues relating to patriarchy such as the legal system. For example, the fight for a uniform family code, inheritance laws, the law where a child’s mother is not her/his legal guardian remains undermined. The absence of women in specific professions, e.g. doctors, teachers, educationists, nurses, lawyers, from mainstream movements is also a noteworthy example of the distancing of the elite from the toiling masses of women. To bridge the rich/poor, have/have-nots, elite/disenfranchised, mainstream/marginalised divide one needs to look perhaps into instances in history where such divides have been broken. The 1971 Muktijuddho (War of Liberation) is the most glaring example of such a historical moment; and women must take pride in their role in this historical juncture of our history. To cite another example from history, surprisingly, it was a young teenage domestic help from Dinajpur, called Yasmeen, whose brutal gang-rape by police and murder was able to bridge this divide in 1995. The incident occurred at the very moment when the then prime minister was attending the International Women’s Conference in Beijing, and who categorically dismissed the episode when asked for comments in her Beijing press conference. It was an affront to every woman in Bangladesh and caused outrage locally, nationally, and internationally. As a result of the countrywide protests, the police were brought to trial and subsequently a new law, albeit minus many of the clauses written up by the women’s movement, Nari O Shishu Nirjaton Daman Ain came into being. The sustainability of the movement could not, however, remain due to a lack of commitment of the elite towards the cause of disenfranchised working women yet again.
   Perhaps the bridging of the rich/poor divide would be sustainable only if the ‘sky is reachable to all’; and all aspirations have a common social root. If the elected union parishad member is able to work towards becoming a member of parliament subsequently, when aspirations of the poorest woman can be made equal to the aspirations of the empowered and elite, when the elite realise that their lifestyles and living standards must remain accountable to the poor, when both rich and poor can walk hand in hand on the crowded streets to demand their rights on an equal footing, that is when the divide will be bridged. We hope that time in history is not too far off.
   Notably, the realisation of these democratic aspirations, particularly of the women’s movements, would eventually depend on the people’s success in forcing the mainstream political parties to include these programmes into the mainstream struggle for democracy, and for that the women’s organisations, along with others, are left with no option but to reinvigorate their own struggles.
   
   Naila Zaman Khan is professor of child neurology, Dhaka Shishu Hospital