DHAKA: The turning point came at midnight, when women hit the streets.
By mid-July, Bangladeshi university students had been protesting for over a month for the reform of government job quotas, which they said created a nepotistic patronage system that rewarded supporters of the ruling Awami League. But few predicted they would bring down Sheikh Hasina, who had ruled Bangladesh for 15 years with an iron fist.
Then, on July 14, Hasina called the protesters “Razakars” — a term for an anti-independence paramilitary force that has become synonymous with “traitor”. Women students, who broadly supported the anti-quota movement, took the remark personally.
That midnight, thousands of residents of the girls’ dorms in Dhaka University flooded out of their halls, defiantly shouting “Who are you? Who am I? Razakar! Razakar!”
The residents of the boys’ dorms joined them and within 48 hours, the uprising had spread throughout the country. In less than a month, Hasina was on a helicopter, fleeing to India.
“It’s because of women that this movement became a people’s revolution,” says Maliha Namla, an organizer at Jahangirnagar University. “Without them, it would not have become one so quickly.”
From July 15 to Aug 5, the Gen Z revolution that led to the fall of Hasina saw the most widespread participation of women in street protests in Bangladesh’s history. Women armed with sticks and stones clashing with police and Awami League enforcers became iconic images of the protests. They led marches, blockaded key intersections, and were heavily involved in organizing and decision-making as student coordinators. After Hasina fled and the country briefly plunged into a state of anarchy, with police on strike, women students stayed out on the streets alongside the men as they guided traffic and conducted night patrols.
“It was unprecedented, and so invigorating and so inspiring,” says Shireen Huq, the chair of Bangladesh’s interim government’s Women’s Affairs Reform Commission. “The disappointing part is that once it was all over, the women [students] disappeared. They were not to be seen in any serious decision-making.”
The student movement itself did not disappear. Three students have been appointed as advisers in the interim government — all three are men. Students have continued to stage protests and campaign against Hasina loyalists, most notably forcing the Chief Justice to resign. They’re conducting a grassroots outreach program to raise awareness of the July uprising, and there are widespread rumors that they have plans to start their own political party.
But the movement has splintered in the aftermath of its success.
“Bit by bit, our group became many groups,” says Namla. “Everyone had a different ideology or approach about how to move forward. The atmosphere became very toxic. And as the movement became divided, women’s participation began to drop.”
When the protests first started in early June, the number of women taking part was fairly low. Umama Fatema, a molecular biology student at Dhaka University, remembers brainstorming with the other women she met at the protests about how to get more involved. They set up a WhatsApp group, and then a Messenger group, and started trying to drum up support for their cause. Soon, they were turning out hundreds, and eventually thousands, of women.
“I’d post things that were meant to create a sense of indignation in the girls,” Fatema laughs. “Like: ‘How can we live with this kind of insult?’ I’d write all these cliché posts.
Fatema recalls a deep sense of unity within the movement while Hasina was in power, and in its immediate aftermath. Roles and decision-making was shared and decentralized, and she says women played particularly critical roles in the Bangla Blockade, when students shut down major roads and railways throughout the country. Fatema herself became the movement’s official spokesperson.
“After the revolution, women as a community became sidelined. There’s a sense of anger among many women as a result of this,” says Fatema. “Say I make an important political point — no one pays any attention. But if a man says the same thing, people fall over themselves with applause.”
The organizers who spoke to The Fuller Project and Foreign Policy say that women have suffered as a result of their desire to keep the movement unified. As infighting grew among the students, women became more likely to take a step back in the hope of keeping the peace. One consequence has been that women have been out-jostled by men vying for leadership positions. Their public visibility has fallen sharply as the men take center-stage, and many of those who are included say they feel their purpose is to serve as the token woman.
“Women aren’t afraid of participating in student movements, being involved in politics, or standing in front of the camera,” says Nusrat Tabassum, a student leader at Dhaka University. “What women fear is that their voices, in general, are not truly heard anywhere. We have to fight men at every step, and that makes it tough.”
Last October, as criticism grew over this lack of representation, the interim government added a Women’s Affairs Reform Commission to its roster of reform committees. They placed Shireen Huq, a veteran activist and one of the founders of Naripokkho, the country’s most prominent women’s rights organization, in charge. Formed much later than most of the other commissions, Huq and her colleagues are now scrambling to get their work done in time to be able to influence the others. They see gender as a cross-cutting issue, and believe their recommendations will only work if they are integrated into the recommendations of the other committees.
“We are trying to buy time,” Huq says.
Unfortunately for Huq and her commission, time is not something the interim government can offer easily. Internally, the government is under pressure internally to hold elections in a timely manner. Meanwhile, they’ve been bombarded from the outside by a disinformation campaign led by the Awami League and their allies, especially in India, which have stoked fears of Islamist violence in the country. Hasina had presented herself as a secular leader who was the only one capable of holding fundamentalist Islam at bay, even as the religious right grew in power during her dictatorship.
“My task is going to be very, very challenging for these reasons as well,” says Huq. “Especially expat Bangladeshis are going paranoid almost — ‘Islamists are taking over’, you know? So partly they’re also being influenced by Indian propaganda. But partly they can’t come to terms with the fact that yes, in fact a lot of the fighters in the street came from religious backgrounds.
“One of the most beautiful images I carry with me now is, the women are coming out of the student dorms, and there’s a woman in a t-shirt and blue jeans holding hands with a woman in a complete niqab. This is something my generation has not learned to come to terms with. This image made me, for the first time, come to terms with it and deal with my own prejudices about all these things.”
Fatema, whose father was once a student activist with an Islamist group before abandoning politics, says she worries both about growing Islamist presence in the halls of Dhaka University and about people looking to politicize the lack of representation of women for Islamophobic purposes.
“If you’re raising this as a political tool, I don’t support that,” says Fatema. “But it is not immaterial. Statecraft is not something that’s only for the boys to learn.”