Last month, as I walked from the stately offices of the International Crimes Tribunal at Dhaka’s Old High Court building to the Shilpakala Academy, I passed a raucous procession cheering a candidate for Jamaat-e-Islami, the country’s largest Islamist party. It was striking: The party, which opposed Bangladesh’s independence decades ago, hopes to make its strongest-ever showing in the country’s elections on Feb. 12.
The fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami has never won more than a small share of the vote. During the 1971 War of Independence, many of its leaders collaborated with Pakistani forces, unleashing terror; at the time, they evaded a reckoning. Jamaat-e-Islami reached its electoral high-water mark—12 percent of the vote—in 1991, but it was severely suppressed during the 15-year rule of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, which ended abruptly in 2024.
This time around, Jamaat-e-Islami may see its popularity surge. Bangladesh’s oldest political party, Hasina’s Awami League, is currently banned from political activity, and it’s hard to predict how its votes will get distributed. During the 2010s, Hasina’s government set up international crimes tribunals and prosecuted many Jamaat-e-Islami leaders; the trials were widely viewed as flawed, perhaps leading to some sympathy for the party. Several of the convicted Jamaat-e-Islami leaders were executed.
Now, the Islamist party doesn’t have a clear path to form a government—but if it becomes a formidable force in parliament, it will raise profound questions about the kind of country Bangladesh wants to be: Muslim or Bengali.
With Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan, it chose linguistic plurality and nationalism—including religious pluralism—over an exclusively Islamist identity with Urdu as the national language. Bangladesh’s laws explicitly affirm equal treatment of faiths and equal rights for women. In a striking historical anomaly for a conservative Muslim-majority country, Bangladesh has been governed by two women for 30 of its 54 years: Hasina and former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP).
Yet, despite commitments that parties adopted in the July Charter last year to field more female candidates in this week’s election, the actual figures are shockingly low. Women make up less than 4 percent of the candidates this year, missing the modest mark set out in the charter; most major parties failed to meet the target.
This is paradoxical: Since its independence, Bangladesh has made extraordinary gains in female empowerment. Its female literacy rate is the highest in South Asia after the Maldives and Sri Lanka. Its female labor force participation exceeds that of India or Pakistan. Bangladesh’s foreign reserves depend on two crucial inflows: remittances from migrant workers abroad and the labor of millions of women employed in garment factories.
Women were also central to the student-led protest movement that ended Hasina’s rule—most of them with clear political ambitions. Yet, as Umama Fatema, a former spokesperson for the Students Against Discrimination platform that led the uprising, told me, once the movement’s political aim was achieved, these women felt deceived. She stepped down from her leadership position, citing disillusionment.
“Women were left out from the first day after the regime fell. We felt used. We felt we were instruments,” Fatema said. “But we were at the forefront.”
Women who were visible and vocal during the uprising have now been denied the opportunity to meaningfully contest the elections. The July Charter, which was intended to signal a political reset, included an agreement for women to make up 5 percent of candidate nominations, to rise eventually to 33 percent. But the provision was nonbinding; as many as 30 of the 51 political parties in Bangladesh, including Jamaat-e-Islami, failed to field even one female candidate.
This failure has implications beyond gender equity. If political parties cannot uphold a modest and procedurally simple commitment, their willingness to implement the more complex reforms promised in the charter—from electoral restructuring to institutional accountability—must be questioned.
Despite Hasina’s and Zia’s leadership, the track record for female candidates in Bangladesh is bleak. No women were directly elected in the country’s first two parliamentary polls, and progress since has been uneven. In the 2008 election, widely recognized as the country’s last free and fair vote, 59 women ran and 19 won. In 2018, 68 women ran and 22 won, but the opposition boycotted the polls. In 2024, though 99 women ran, only 20 were elected—again, most of them unopposed.
This year’s figures are lamentably poor: Women submitted just 4 percent of the nomination papers for candidacy, and after scrutiny, only 63 remained among 1,842 candidates. Major parties bear primary responsibility. The BNP, which is likely to perform well, has nominated only 10 women—almost all related to former male parliamentarians. The exclusion appears deliberate: Even during months of meetings leading up to the July Charter, parties rarely sent women representatives.
Smaller, left-leaning parties have fielded more women, but few are expected to win seats. Shahinur Akter Sumi, 27, who was part of the uprising and is contesting a constituency in Dhaka, told me that she has an advantage in a conservative society: “I find it easy to enter homes and speak to women. My male rivals cannot.” But as a candidate of the Socialist Party of Bangladesh (Marxist), she has an uphill struggle.
One promising left-leaning candidate is Taslima Akhter, who is known for her work on behalf of Bangladesh’s female garment workers and for her photography. She speaks eloquently of structural inequalities in the country; housing, grocery prices, and other everyday concerns dominate her campaign. Women want equality, respect, and dignity, she said in an interview. Of garment workers, Akhter told me: “Their strength is what gives us hope. They are fighters who have built their lives.”
The irony is stark. Though Hasina and Zia ruled in their own right, they both rose through male political lineages. Hasina’s father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, was Bangladesh’s first president; Zia’s husband, Ziaur Rahman, was among the officers who commanded Bangladeshi forces in the War of Independence. Both were assassinated. Though Hasina and Zia proved skilled politicians, their leadership did not dismantle structural barriers for women. Zia permitted Islamic interpretation of gender roles, while Hasina weakened laws against child marriage, in a nod to fundamentalists.
This contradiction mirrors what economist Naila Kabeer calls the “Bangladesh paradox”: that despite the country’s remarkable progress in female education, health, and labor participation, formal political representation remains stubbornly low. Kabeer attributes past change in part to bottom-up agency. Women exploited cracks in the system—male migration, economic necessity—to push into new spaces as health workers, garment laborers, family-planning advocates, and decision-makers, which accumulated into a profound norm shift.
The state reflects this progress: Women now serve across the civil administration, which makes the contrast with electoral politics especially glaring. Jesmin Tuli, a former additional secretary of the Election Commission, told the Daily Star that the candidate nomination process remains “deeply male-dominated.” Women lack access to campaign logistics, patronage networks, and the muscle still central to mobilization.
Religious conservatism has intensified this exclusion. Jamaat-e-Islami has recently gained disproportionate influence, buoyed by the Awami League ban. The Islamist party has tried to placate middle-class voters and women, saying that it would not roll back women’s rights. But its vision of society assigns women a secondary role, and its leaders have openly said God did not intend women to govern. (This has not historically stopped Jamaat-e-Islami from allying with the Awami League or the BNP when they were led by women.)
Bangladeshi human rights lawyer Sara Hossain has said that when women who are part of Jamaat-e-Islami say they have accepted male leadership as being more important than female leadership, it is important for such statements to be challenged and rejected. In a recent event in Dhaka, she said: “You don’t have to see what Islamic law has to say about this—Bangladesh does not follow Islamic law. The equality of women and men is in the country’s constitution, and it has to be kept as such.”
The backlash to surging feminist movements in Bangladesh has been vicious. Groups such as Hefazat-e-Islam, with their own interpretations of Islam, have mobilized against the recommendations of the Women’s Affairs Reform Commission on property and inheritance rights. This appears to be not religious piety but moral panic—an anxiety about losing patriarchal control. The commission did not propose abolishing religious law but has suggested alternatives. The fiercest outrage centers on inheritance: If the traditionalists have their way, male privilege will override equal rights.
The consequences of women’s exclusion from land ownership are severe: vulnerability after divorce or widowhood, lack of access to credit or state subsidies, and entrenched dependency on male relatives or charity. But Bangladesh’s economy would collapse without women’s labor. In addition to dominating the main export garment sector, women underpin agriculture and the informal economy—yet they remain hidden in policy and statistics.
Finally, it is not only clerics who resist reform. Secular and progressive men also retreat when change threatens domestic hierarchies. They march for democracy but invoke supposed cultural authenticity arguments when confronted with demands around marital rape, guardianship, or labor rights for sex workers.
Since the 2024 uprising that brought down Hasina, women have been pushed out of public decision-making in Bangladesh. Historically, women have been prominent in demonstrations against authorities in Bengal—from pushing back against the British when Bangladesh was part of India to rebuking Bangladeshi governments when they acted against women’s rights. The protest movement briefly suggested the possibility of a new political settlement—one based on equity rather than control.
Now, many activists fear that the moment is passing and the old guard has returned in new forms. Reform commissions, political roundtables, and national debates are dominated by men. When men monopolize power, it is called expertise; when women demand inclusion, it is branded divisive. Targeting women during moments of political crisis is an old tactic. When political legitimacy erodes, power turns inward—toward policing bodies, choices, and rights. Women become symbols to be protected or punished.
Across decades, a pattern has emerged across South Asia, with only a few exceptions. Women enter politics but rarely on their own terms. In 1905, the year Lord Curzon, the viceroy of British-ruled India, divided Bengal into Hindu and Muslim halves, a writer from what was not yet Bangladesh, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, wrote of a feminist utopia in her novel, Sultana’s Dream. It is time for Bangladesh to reclaim and reassert those roots.
