A feminist manifesto for Bangladesh

Nafisa Nipun Tanjeem

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.

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