Bangladesh recently witnessed one of the most magnificent grassroots mobilisations of the youth
in its history, which overthrew the 15-year-long dictatorial regime of the then Prime Minister
Sheikh Hasina. The power of this issue-based, bottom-up, decentralised, grassroots, and
youth-led movement has now enabled us to dare to dream. I would argue that this is also a
critical moment for feminist questioning, reimagining, and mobilising. The frustrating
developments in the last few weeks, including a series of attacks on women in public spaces,
attacks on sex workers and threatening of their livelihoods, deadly mob violence and killing of
a person with mental health struggles on a university campus—among other instances of lynching,
attacks against religious minorities, attacks against Indigenous communities in the Chittagong
Hill Tracks region, and verbal threats and physical attacks against gender non-conforming
communities, urge us to rethink what a feminist manifesto could and should look like in this
new, strange, and uncertain reality of Bangladesh, which—I hope to believe—is also full of
radical possibilities.
A decolonial feminist vision for Bangladesh
By “feminism,” I don’t mean the aspiration to be equal to men. Men are neither the enemy nor the
standard to achieve. Moreover, women who gain power by capitalising on social and financial ties,
and who protect the interests of powerful institutions instead of fighting for the commoners, will
not do any good to Bangladesh. We have learned this the hard way.
By feminism, I mean transformative and decolonial theorising and organising for social change. We
need a feminism that dismantles all our heteropatriarchal assumptions and practices. We need a
feminism that celebrates the beauty of gender diversity. We need a feminism that eradicates
institutional and everyday disparities among various sexes and sexualities.
We need a feminism that critically investigates the political economy of various local, regional, and
transnational forces and the way in which these forces sustain or dismantle secular, fundamentalist,
and all values in between. We need a feminism that embodies strong anti-capitalist critiques, one
that fights against the neocolonial and neoliberal forces which make already privileged people even
more privileged. We need a feminism that fights against the material obstacles experienced by all
minoritised and marginalised communities. We need a feminism that is revolutionary, that is not
restricted by any politics of funding, that is inseparable from grassroots struggles and resistance.
What would such a feminist manifesto look like for Bangladesh?
Building a feminist archive of the July massacre and student uprising
We need feminist scholars and activists to archive a feminist history of the July massacre and
student uprising. From the very beginning, female student activists had been at the forefront of
mobilising in their student dorms and outside, continuing the protest even when the male students
could not be there for various reasons. Many spent sleepless nights supporting wounded students at
hospitals and many other places. We have seen them chanting on the streets, drawing protest graffiti
on the roadside walls and the streets, and facing the cops and getting hurt. Nusrat Tabassum, a
coordinator of the quota reform movement and a political science student at the University of Dhaka,
was abducted and taken for so-called “safety custody” by the Dhaka
Metropolitan Police’s Detective
Branch, alongside other coordinators.
We have also seen many female protestors wearing keffiyehs during protests and painting graffiti of
Palestinian and Bangladeshi flags, depicting a deep understanding of the interconnectedness between
the struggles of Bangladeshis and Palestinians against oppressive regimes.
Nevertheless, as the movement moved forward, we observed that the faces of women organisers
disappeared gradually. We didn’t see them in the newly appointed interim government body or at the
forefront of various decision-making student bodies. Some of the popular faces of female student
organisers experienced chauvinistic trolling and sexual harassment in digital as well as physical
spaces for speaking up in the face of power.
To counter this, we need thorough and timely feminist archiving, documentation, and historiography,
which will reverse the erasure of the experience and activism of women, challenge the sexist
history-telling process, and curate a her-story that will inspire generations to come.
Prioritising concerns of minoritised communities (now, not later)
We need to address some so-called sensitive/controversial issues which were put away during the mass
uprising by saying, “Not now, later.” Elora Chowdhury has powerfully pointed out that this
“not now,
later” attitude is a massive obstacle to bringing about transformative changes. Yes, #StepDownHasina
was the prime demand of the time, but now—in the post-Hasina era—we must look critically at those
so-called controversial issues and ask uncomfortable questions.
We need to begin by salvaging feminism in Bangladesh from its hyper-focus on individual identities,
which erases the intersectionality of experiences and roles of oppressive structures and
institutions. For a long time, the mainstream and heavily NGO-ised feminist movement in Bangladesh
has selectively focused on the universal category of “women.” It has ignored differences within the
category of women, as well as the need for developing critiques of imperial, neoliberal, and
capitalist institutions which created and sustained minoritised experiences. The mainstream feminist
movement in Bangladesh also has a long history of carefully alienating trans/queer/non-binary
communities and their organising—as if their concerns are not a feminist issue.
The government of Sheikh Hasina selectively extended limited recognition and support for what it
(very problematically) called the “third gender,” but did next to nothing to establish the security
and rights of various non-binary and queer communities. The current power vacuum and the unstable
and uncertain situation have heightened security threats for these communities, especially when we
see some leaders of the anti-discrimination student movement itself openly sharing homophobic and
transphobic remarks and
allying with well-known right-wing, orthodox, and conservative faces. To
truly uphold the value of “anti-discrimination,” one should oppose all discriminatory norms, values,
laws, policies, and practices that establish the hegemony of certain privileged groups.
We should collectively organise against the continuation of the Bangalee settler colonial project on
Indigenous lands and resources. We have just watched the unleashing of deadly violence against the
Jumma communities in the Chittagong Hill Track region, killing and injuring their people and
destroying their homes and businesses. The interim government has recently extended the executive
magisterial power to the commissioned officers of the Bangladesh Army, which has a long and
contested history in the CHT. Only time will say what this superpower of the army would mean for the
region, where indigenous communities have long been struggling for self-representation and
self-determination.
In August, right after some Indigenous activist groups expressed concerns about the lack of
democratic participation in the top-down selection process of the Indigenous member of the interim
government. We need the interim government to start listening to Indigenous grassroots community
organisers and start taking concrete steps to demilitarise indigenous lands and resources, as well
as return lands forcefully taken from the Indigenous communities.
Right after the fall of Hasina, it was heartwarming to see students taking charge of controlling
traffic on the streets and communities coming together to provide security to neighbourhoods and,
specifically, places of religious worship and houses of minoritised communities. While community
support plays a critical role during a crisis, it is inadequate and—simply speaking—unable to
replace the role of the state. We cannot let the state off the hook and succumb to the neoliberal
motto of romanticising individual responsibility. We need a reformed and reconstructed state, which
will play its due part.
An urge for critical self-examination
Let’s take a step back and think about the very term “Anti-discrimination Student Movement.” If a
movement was genuinely against all forms of discrimination, we must name the inadvertent
discriminatory elements within the movement. A section of the movement, which
included women leaders
as well, claimed that university-going women do not need women’s quotas anymore because they were
not a disadvantaged group. Claims like this require critical scrutiny since women were employed
in
less than 20 percent of civil service jobs in the 43rd BCS examination. In the last six BCS
examinations, men occupied 75 percent of the advertised civil service posts.
Many argued that the
cancellation of women’s quota in 2018, among many other factors, has negatively
affected women’s participation in public administration in Bangladesh. While reserving quotas for
women will not change patriarchal and discriminatory social norms or eradicate the structural
barriers which obstruct women from participating in civil service after graduation, reserving quotas
for women and prioritising this demand in grassroots mobilising is the very first reparative step to
enabling women in fighting against obstructive social norms and structures.
Similarly, the mainstream narratives around the anti-discrimination student organising did not centre
concerns coming from the Indigenous communities which experienced a drastic reduction of quota from
five percent to one percent by the Supreme Court verdict in July. The verdict also clustered “third
gender” with “physically challenged people” and reserved a one percent quota for both groups,
thereby inadvertently pathologising the “third gender” community.
The “freedom fighter” quota lost relevance after more than 50 years of the Liberation War of
Bangladesh. This specific quota had a long history of being used as a tool for discrimination,
nepotism, and politically favoured appointments. However, there were other quotas that primarily
served as affirmative action for minoritized and marginalised communities who could not achieve
appropriate representation due to institutional and structural barriers.
It was paramount for the anti-discrimination student movement to articulate the difference between
discriminatory and affirmative action quotas clearly. Clustering discriminatory quotas and
affirmative action quotas into a single category erased the difference between “discrimination” and
“affirmative action”—or, in a worse way—labelled all affirmative action quotas as “discriminatory.”
The binary motto of the movement— “Quota na medha? Medha, medha” (“Quota or merit? Merit,
merit”)—uncritically cherished meritocracy, creating a profoundly exclusionary scenario for various
minoritised and marginalised communities.
The move from the nine-point demand to the one-point demand of #StepDownHasina in last July was the
most just demand of the time. However, it’s important that we simply don’t let the initial questions
and concerns regarding discriminatory quotas disappear and that we keep addressing the disparities.
Concerns and hopes for the future
The interim government representatives met with some women leaders last month to discuss critical
concerns regarding women’s rights, including some much-needed topics such
as the need to end sexual
assault and violence against women, concerns regarding discriminatory inheritance, guardianship,
citizenship, and other family laws, and barriers to withdrawing reservations of some CEDAW and ILO
convention articles. Recent dialogues and demonstrations organised by the “Khubdho Nari
Shomaj” also
brought forward some timely concerns regarding the absence of initiatives to create women’s rights
commission and workers’ rights commission, the need for reforming the constitution to address
women’s rights more equitably and comprehensively, and the need for enacting sexual harassment
policy in government and non-government institutions, among many other questions and critiques.
While this is a good start, we are still unsure how the interim government and its advisors choose
which community representatives to engage with for dialogues. There has been a long-standing
tradition of appointing well-funded and well-known NGO representatives as the mouthpiece for all
women. The interim government needs to be careful about not repeating this historical trend,
especially given a good number of interim government advisors come from NGO backgrounds. We hope
they do not stay confined within their urban, elite, cis, Bengali, middle- and upper-class,
NGO-based professional and social inner circles while making vital decisions for the entire country.
We need to remember that NGOs and communities are not the same thing. NGOs are organisations that
work with communities, and they cannot be replacements for communities as the interim government
makes vital decisions. Grassroots feminists and trans and queer community organisers who work
outside of the dominant fund- and project-driven NGO model, and hold revolutionary views for social
transformation, need to have seats and agency at decision-making tables. Demands put forward by the
Diverse Feminist Collective and the Feminist
Alliance of Bangladesh are two recent examples of
powerful intersectional and decolonial feminist visions for Bangladesh, which go beyond narrowly
focused identity politics and NGO-ised feminism and adequately challenge intersecting systems of
oppression.
If we are to dream of a decolonial future for Bangladesh, let’s start challenging the status quo
embedded within our mainstream NGO-ised and corporatised feminist organising. Let’s bring the
experiences of grassroots community organisers from minoritised and marginalised communities to the
centre and learn from their grassroots resistance and transformative vision.
Nafisa Nipun Tanjeem
is an educator, researcher, writer, and activist. She is associate professor in the Department
of
Interdisciplinary Studies at Worcester State University in Massachusetts, US.
