Women played a key role in the 2024 student-led uprising that rocked Bangladesh’s political foundations. They marched in the streets, blockaded roads, painted slogans, and participated in strategy sessions. After the autocratic government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina fell, women organized nighttime patrols to monitor public safety.
Now, as Bangladesh prepares to hold its first election since the uprising, women are largely absent from the political stage. On the black-and-white campaign banners that line the streets of this cacophonous capital, the faces that stare down at voters are nearly all male. Only a handful of small, left-wing parties have nominated more than a token few women. And of the women who are on the ballot, about one-third are the wives and daughters of male politicians.
Controversy over the mostly male nominees comes as conservative Islamist groups have sought to fill the power vacuum left by Ms. Hasina’s ouster, asserting greater influence in public life. For reformers who believed the 2024 uprising would usher in an era of greater gender parity, the nominations have been a rude awakening, raising questions about the appetite for social and cultural change in the majority-Muslim country.
Why We Wrote This
Women were central to the 2024 uprising that put Bangladesh back on a path to democracy. Now, with Islamist parties on the rise and women notably absent from this week’s ballots, some worry about their role in the country’s future.
“Women were at the forefront of the movement, but this has been eradicated from the narrative,” says Sharmee Hossain, a linguistics professor at the North South University in Dhaka.
Bangladesh’s dynastic politics
On Feb. 12, voters go to the polls to elect a Parliament that will form a government, replacing an interim administration installed in August 2024. More than 50 parties are contesting the election, the front-runner being the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, or BNP, which previously alternated in power with Ms. Hasina’s Awami League.
These two parties have put a secular stamp on Bangladeshi nationalism, and they have also been led by women; both, however, are scions of storied dynasties. Ms. Hasina is the daughter of Bangladesh’s founding president, while her archrival, the late former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, was the widow of an Army officer who served as president.
In dynastic politics, “your true power is derived not from yourself, but from which dynasty you come from,” says Mir Nidia Nivin, who chaired an electoral reform commission under the interim government.
Bangladeshi women hold leadership positions in nonprofit organizations, private businesses, educational institutions, and other sectors. But “the last bastion of power is politics, and that’s where the last resistance is,” says Ms. Nivin.
Last year, political parties committed to increase the number of women in Parliament as part of a package of reforms brokered by the interim government. Parties agreed that at least 5% of nominees would be women. But that target, which was criticized at the time by activists as too low, hasn’t been met. Of the 1,981 registered candidates, 85 are women, or around 4%.
Tajnuva Jabeen should be on that list. She had begun raising money and meeting voters in Dhaka as the nominee of the National Citizens Party, which she helped to set up last year along with other activists from the 2024 uprising. She then found out in December that the party leaders, who are all men, had quietly forged an electoral pact with Jamaat-e-Islami, the country’s largest Islamist party.
Of all its political opponents, Ms. Hasina’s administration perhaps cracked down hardest on Jamaat, banning the party from participating in elections and executing several of its leaders for crimes committed during Bangladesh’s 1971 war for independence. It has staged a strong comeback and is likely to win its largest-ever number of seats in this week’s election.
Ms. Jabeen was asked to step aside and to campaign for Jamaat’s pick, who, like all of the party’s 179 candidates, is a man. The party’s manifesto supports women’s “active and dignified” participation in health care, education, and other sectors, but its leader, Shafiqur Rahman, recently told Al Jazeera that women can never lead the party.
So Ms. Jabeen quit, joining other women who left in protest of the alliance.
“That was the only honorable option left,” says Ms. Jabeen, an internal medicine doctor whose activism is focused on women’s empowerment. “I cannot align with those parties. They consider women [as] second-class citizens.”
Barriers in the secular lane
The Awami League, which dominated Bangladeshi politics for 15 years, is barred from contesting the election, leaving the secular lane to the BNP. It has nominated 10 women, though some who didn’t make the candidate list are running as independents.
Mirza Fakhrul Alamgir, the party’s secretary-general, defends its selection as a pragmatic move designed to maximize the BNP’s chances of success. “I need more than 151 seats in Parliament to form a government. So, I definitely prefer the candidates who will win the election,” he says.
Raising the number of seats in Parliament held by women was among the goals outlined last year by a reform commission on women’s affairs. The commission proposed an expansion of the number of directly elected seats from 300 to 600, with half set aside for women. Bangladesh’s Parliament currently has a quota of 50 reserve seats that parties must allocate to women after elections; those lawmakers, though, rarely climb the political ladder because they lack a power base.
Simon Montlake/The Christian Science Monitor
Shireen Huq, who chaired the commission, says her proposal was warmly received by women in political parties. “They said … these are things we cannot speak about in our parties,” she says. “None of the political parties have any democratic practice inside, which means that marginalized voices can never be heard.”
Islamists were less enamored with Ms. Huq’s commission. Last May, the hard-line advocacy group Hefazat-e-Islam held a large rally in Dhaka to demand the commission’s dissolution after the panel proposed creating a civil alternative to Islamic family law, making marital rape a crime, and recognizing sex workers. Ms. Huq says organizers handed out printed copies of her photograph with a black cross on it.
The commission’s report had been endorsed by the interim government. After the rally, though, “there were people who felt intimidated,” says Ms. Huq. “The government immediately retreated.” Most of the commission’s proposals were sidelined, including Parliament quotas.
Hefazat-e-Islam’s political wing has since joined the Jammat-led alliance. Among the group’s candidates is Mamunul Haque, an educator who was jailed three times under Ms. Hasina and traveled to Afghanistan last year with a delegation of Islamist politicians at the invitation of the Taliban. The visit stoked concerns among Bangladeshis who fear a Jamaat-led government would take its cues from Kabul and curb women’s rights.
Mr. Haque says Bangladesh could benefit from economic cooperation with Afghanistan, but that the country had “significant shortcomings” in the education and employment of women. “In Bangladesh, we are not in favor of restricting women’s education,” he says.
Last week, he held a meeting at a Dhaka community center with hundreds of women who he says “are actively campaigning for me and also serving as a strong vote bank.” Indeed, many women support Islamist parties. Disenchanted with the dominant secular parties, they hope that Jamaat and its allies can deliver on campaign promises of weeding out corruption and protecting women’s safety.
But none of these women were visible as Mr. Haque delivered a pep talk: A floor-to-ceiling sheet separated them from the candidate, who spoke into the fabric. When Mr. Haque left with his entourage, the women waited in their section of the room.