BD's false impression of women's empowerment
When Myanmar in 2017 launched a systematic campaign of terror to annihilate Muslim Rohingya communities, according to one report by the Ontario International Development Agency (OIDA), soldiers raped around 18,000 girls and women.
Rape and sexual assault were used as weapons to demoralize communities, and the Myanmar army, apart from killing hundreds of people, used rape as a strategy to spread fear with a view to ensuring that the Rohingya, especially the women, would never think of returning to their land. Now let's look at Bangladesh. Since the 2014 election that left more than half of the country disfranchised and around 10% of the remaining electorate voted the Awami League into power after all the other parties unallied to the Awami League boycotted the poll, 20,835 women, girls and even children had filed reports of raped by April 2019.
If we compare the numbers, in Bangladeshi under Sheikh Hasina's Awami League, around 2,000 more women and girls have been raped in a time of "peace" than those raped by Myanmar's state forces under that country's reign of terror. The numbers are particularly formidable considering that in a Muslim-majority nation like Bangladesh, it is rare for a woman to report being raped.
This being the case, when the World Economic Forum (WEF) this year declared Bangladesh an epitome of women's empowerment in South Asia, concerned citizens found it hard to believe. Recently Shafquat Rabbee, a Bangladeshi-American geopolitical columnist and an adjunct faculty member at the University of Dallas, rightly pointed out, "Rape without punishment and plunder are the ultimate expressions of absolute, uncontrollable, immoral power."
Before 2011, Bangladesh's constitution provided for an impartial caretaker government made up of technocrats with apparently no formal political affiliation to oversee a national election. This process facilitated four elections that were endorsed by the international community as fair and credible.
In 2011, two years before the next national election, the Awami League-led administration unilaterally scrapped the caretaker-government system. This meant that the next election would be held under a prime minister nominated by the Awami League. In a country known for political violence during elections, this created a sense of impunity among members of the Awami League.
According to data provided by Justice Audit Bangladesh, the average number of cases of women and child repression was 15,343 per year under the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) regime of 200206, and the number was 15,553 under the militarybacked caretaker and half of the Awami League regime (2007-10). This average skyrocketed to 20,890 cases after the caretaker-government system was removed from the constitution and the Awami League came to power (2011-15).
We can debate for hours and commission researches on the causation and correlation of Bangladesh's political impunity and harassment of women, but we cannot deny the numbers and trends that clearly show how rape and harassment increased significantly after the Awami League gave the impression to its people that it was going to stay in power longer than any previous regimes.
The myth of political empowerment
According to the WEF report, Bangladesh's "success" of women's empowerment was measured by its performance in four key areas, and apart from political empowerment, the country ranked lower than in 2006 in all three remaining areas: economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, and health and survival.
Numerically, there is no doubt that women's political empowerment has indeed increased. However, the numbers can also tell us a different story. One good example is the proportion of female members of parliament.
A K M Wahiduzzaman