arsenic poisoning in Bangladesh/India

by

Nurul Kabir

What we do in the world reflects what we know about it, and what we know depends on how we go about knowing, or in other words when thinking about change we should start by thinking about thinking.
– Bawden R. and R. Macadam

Men govern the nations primarily by birthright

Is Bangladesh a democracy? The country’s elite, importantly among them many a member of the mainstream intelligentsia across the political divide, publicly assert that it is — the prime argument behind the claim being the transfer of power through moderately ‘free and fair’ elections. The observation is misleading, in the first place, precisely because it suffers conceptually from an unsound understanding of democracy. The idea of ruling a country by birthright, which is nothing but monarchy, rightly appears to be an absurd proposition in modern political systems across the world today.

But millions of men and women in Bangladesh, and beyond, hardly notice, let alone question, the fact that the men govern the nations primarily by birthright, and that too in the name of democracy.

Democracy is a way of life, with specific political, economic and philosophical manifestations in the collective existence of a populace in any given country. Democracy, to be politically pervasive, creates a ‘people’s republic’ based on the ‘general will’ of the people, which not only promises equality of citizens, but also enforces the equality in all sections of the citizenry.

Economically, democracy is supposed to pursue an egalitarian policy with a clear political objective of distributing national resources equitably among citizens; and philosophically, a democratic state is supposed to put in conscious efforts to ensure emergence of every citizen as a sovereign individual, of course under the provisions of the ‘social contract’ that they enter into while organising the republic.

That Bangladesh’s ‘democracy’ does not qualify to be democracy is palpably evident on another vital count — its attitude towards the female citizens who constitute more than half of the country’s population. Democratic equality means, in the first place, the equality of men and women, as much as it means the equality of citizens belonging to different faiths, classes, et cetera, particularly in terms of ensuring equal opportunities to participate in running the affairs of the state.

The state machinery: predominantly a male affair

The political perceptions of Bangladesh’s elite is visibly infected with a gendered political outlook that is inherently insensitive towards the democratic equality of men and women, which finds clear expression in the horribly low level of female representation in all the three organs of the state machine — Legislature, Executive and Judiciary.

The Legislature, Jatiya Sangsad in other words, enjoying the authority to formulate/amend/scrap laws that are to be obeyed equally by all the citizens, including the female ones, does not have a democratically acceptable number of female legislators, in the first place. Originally, there were only seven women, including Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina, in the 300-strong parliament. Later, four years after the parliament was formed through direct elections, 45 female members were inducted into the Legislature, to fill the reserved seats for women, in September 2005, but they were chosen by the 300 Members of Parliament, not the people.1

Notably, there were 7,50,00,656 voters2 in the last parliamentary polls. Of them, 3,63,15,684, or 48.42 per cent, were female. The total number of votes cast was 5,61,85,707, which is 75.59 per cent of the total eligible voters.3 Reports have it that the turn-out of female voters was larger than that of the males!

Now, such a huge number of female voters, who took active interest in exercising their right to franchise, did not opt for the male candidates out of free choice. They were, rather, ‘forced’ to choose the male candidates. The reason is simple: The two power-seeking mainstream political parties, Bangladesh Nationalist Party and Bangladesh Awami League, set up only three and nine female candidates respectively, excepting Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina, who contested in five seats each.4

The situation in the local government is no different. There are as many as 4,223 elected Union Parishads in the country, as of March 2003. Of them only 22 are headed by women. Besides, the Union Parishads have a total of 40,392 members elected to the general seats, and only 85 of them are women.5 Here, also, the number of female candidates was significantly tiny.

Presently, there is no woman among 48 secretaries of the government, no woman among six secretaries in-charge, and no woman among nine top officials with rank and status of a secretary while there is only one female among 66 additional secretaries of the government.7

Besides, there are only 14 women in the total of 374 joint secretaries, only 134 women among 1,134 deputy secretaries, only 205 women among 1,525 senior assistant secretaries, and only 233 women among 1,263 assistant secretaries.8

The males also heavily dominate the Judiciary — the machinery for delivering justice to the citizens, both males and females.

The government statistics shows that Bangladesh has a total of some nine lakh people employed in the public sector, of whom only 11 per cent are female, that too mostly in third or fourth class positions.

However, it is the policy-planners of the political parties of a country, particularly those conducting the affairs of the state in a democratic dispensation, who play the most crucial role in formulating policies for recruiting human resources into the judicial and executive wings of the state on the one hand, and in nominating candidates for the seats in the Legislature on the other.

A look at the gender composition of the policy-making bodies of the country’s two major political parties, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and Bangladesh Awami League, can provide a clue to the poor rate of female presence in the organs of the state.

The brief almanac of the poor level of female presence in the state’s organs, and in the top policy-making bodies of the political parties that manage the state, clearly indicates that the democratically required scope for the female citizens to make their voice heard, or their equal rights effectively upheld by the wings of the state, is absent. It is, therefore, not surprising that Bangladesh ranks 79th, among 80 countries, in the ‘Gender Empowerment Measure’ prepared by the United Nations Development Programme.13

Women’s democratic rights: state’s undemocratic responses

Numerous examples can be cited to show the undemocratic responses of the different branches of the state to the calls for ensuring many a constitutionally guaranteed right of the female citizens. But here is a representative case, a single episode, in which all the three branches of the state — Executive, Legislature and Judiciary — displayed an enormous amount of disregard for the basic democratic rights of a female citizen. It would, however, require a short trip down memory lane.

A vibrant young woman, Badhan, wanted to be part of the New Year’s celebrations in 2000. It was not only the start of a new year but also a new century. She chose Dhaka University as a safe place to enjoy the first few hours of the New Year, and the new century, perhaps believing that the ‘enlightened’ university students would be tolerant, if not appreciative, of a young woman participating in the midnight celebrations.

Yet, she dared not go there alone. Perhaps, who knows, she was aware of the lurking dangers that await a young woman like her at ‘inconvenient’ hours in a male-dominated society. She, therefore, managed to persuade two male friends accompany her to the campus. Perhaps their presence inspired in her some sense of security. Unfortunately, secure she was not.

As soon as she had reached the venue, a gang of crude revelers took her trail. They started making obscene remarks and gestures at her before swooping on her. ‘Badhan was molested, trampled by the pack of hyenas who pounced on her, some flashing their teeth in sadistic joy while they held part of her dress,’ reported an English language daily.14

Badhan and the Executive

The members of the law enforcing agency called the police, an organ of the executive branch of the state, reportedly played the role of mute spectators when the girl came under sexual assault on the university campus. They came forward to rescue the hapless woman almost half an hour after the assault began, and that too after a section of the crowd had started protesting against the lawmen’s dastardly silence. By then, as various newspapers had reported, the girl was ‘almost disrobed’.

Some people, men to be precise, might argue that the inaction of a few constables in the present case cannot be considered to be the standard attitude of the police as an institution. But the fact remains that the attitude which the then top boss of the concerned police station showed was absolutely identical to that of his constables. The officer-in-charge of the Ramna Police, Rafiqul Islam, rather publicly defended his constables’ inaction, and shamelessly questioned the integrity of the victim of the sexual assaults. In a bid to justify his men’s inaction, the officer claimed before the press the next day, on January 2, 2000, that Badhan was ‘improperly dressed and dancing’ and asserted: ‘What is such a big issue to you is nothing to us...If someone dances nakedly we have nothing to do’.15

The police officer lied about Badhan’s attire, in the first place. The pictures, taken moments before the beginning of the assault and carried by a good number of newspapers, clearly showed that the girl had a decent dress on when she reached the venue. Her clothes were torn to pieces in front of the policemen. But the police officer, explicitly oblivious of his constitutional responsibility to uphold the ‘fundamental human rights, and freedom and respect for the dignity and worth of the human person’ of the citizens,16 rather made a deliberate attempt to publicly defame the victimised woman in question.

He also proved least bothered about the republic’s constitutional edict that the ‘women shall have equal rights with men in all spheres of the state and public life and that no citizen shall, on grounds only of...sex...be subjected to any...restriction...with regard to access to any place of public entertainment…’ .17 The police boss did not find it important to make any ‘endeavour to ensure equality of opportunity to all citizens’,18 by way of protecting her ‘fundamental human rights’ to participate in a public celebration.

Badhan and the (lower) Judiciary

The judiciary, which, in a democracy, is supposed to deliver distributive justice to all sections of the society irrespective of the citizens’ religious, racial or gender identity, also displayed a crude bias against the female citizens, when it came to putting the male accused in the Badhan assault case on police remand for interrogation. While a Bangladeshi magistrate has the legal authority to put an accused in a criminal case on police remand for 15 consecutive days, and whereas there are precedents that the accused in certain cases were on remand even for more than 15 days, the magistrate in the present case turned down a police prayer for putting some of the accused on a fresh remand of three days, after the end of a five-day remand, for further interrogation.19 Moreover, the ground that the magistrate, Abul Kashem, used for turning down the prayer for remand was explicitly anti-women, and shamefully misleading. The magistrate claimed that ‘the behaviour of both the accused and the woman who was assaulted…was reckless as per newspaper reports’!20

The newspapers reported that the sexist group of males ‘annoyed’ the woman, ‘pounced’ on her, ‘molested’ her, and eventually ‘unrobed’ her, without any provocation. No newspaper report claimed that the woman in question ‘annoyed’ the boys, ‘pounced’ on them, ‘molested’ them, and finally ‘unrobed’ them. But the magistrate, or the judicial wing of the state for that matter, found the behaviour of the female victim of the sexual assault to be as ‘reckless’ as that of the group of males that had sexually assaulted the hapless woman!!

The magistrate, like the police officer in question, must have found a night-time outing and, that too, to join a public celebration, ‘reckless’ behavior on the part of a woman! In the process, the magistrate made a mockery of the constitutional provision pledging that ‘no person shall be deprived of...personal liberty save in accordance with law’.21

The same male supremacist mindset of the magistrate made him forget that there is no legal bar for a female citizen to exercise her right to ‘personal liberty’ in attending a public ceremony at any time of the day or night. The magistrate, like his police counterpart in the present case, was also oblivious of the fact that the constitution of the republic pledges that ‘no citizen shall, on grounds only of...sex...be subjected to any...restriction...with regard to access to any place of public entertainment…’.22

Under this circumstance, it is not surprising that the criminal case lodged in connection with sexual assault on Badhan is still pending with the court, unresolved, for more than six years now.23

One wonders, given the undemocratic attitude of the executive, the judicial and the legislative wings of the state towards women, as to when, if at all, the court will eventually deliver justice to the victim of the sexual assault in question, and what kind of justice.

Badhan and the Executive

Badhan and the (lower) Judiciary

One wonders, given the undemocratic attitude of the executive, the judicial and the legislative wings of the state towards women, as to when, if at all, the court will eventually deliver justice to the victim of the sexual assault in question, and what kind of justice.

Badhan and the Legislature

The Jatiya Sangsad (national parliament) began its maiden session of the year on January 1, 2000 — a few hours after Badhan was assaulted on the Dhaka University campus. But the issue did not appear in the parliament’s ‘order of the day’ in the month-long session that lasted until January 30. Unofficially it came up, on January 25, when a legislator of the then ruling party, the Awami League, while speaking on a motion of thanks on the presidential address in parliament, touched on the issue.

‘How could a Muslim woman go for an outing at the dead of night...? Was it wrong that the drunk young men jumped on the lady who was dancing on the street with half of her body exposed?’ the legislator, Jainal Abedin Hazari, asked on the floor of parliament.24 The legislator replied to his own question: ‘It was only natural that she was treated this way.’ 25

He was reportedly uninterrupted by anyone, including the speaker of the Jatiya Sangsad and the female members present on the occasion.

The legislator also lambasted the newspapers ‘for writing too much on the incident’. He, however, did not take the trouble to criticise the section of the print media that published explicit photographs of the victim of sexual assault, further increasing her humiliation. The lawmaker finally observed that ‘Badhan, like Russell (the main accused in the assault case), should also face trial for dancing on the street’.26

As regards the poor woman’s attire, the legislator cast aspersions on the woman the same way the police officer in question did, by making an extremely exaggerated statement that ‘she was dancing with half of her body exposed’. However, the political and cultural essence of the legislator’s utterances clearly state that women, particularly Muslim women, are not eligible to go out of the house at night, and that the women, if they do go out at night to attend any public celebration, will ‘naturally’ deserve to get sexually assaulted, and that there is nothing wrong in ‘drunk young men jumping on a lady’ at a public function, and that newspapers have no business giving so much importance to such incidents of sexual harassment and that the innocent victims of the sexual assault needs to be tried, along with the perpetrators of the sexual assault, in the court of law!!! A lawmaker’s crude gender bias, coupled with a male-supremacist outlook, perhaps could not have been more explicit even in mediaeval times.

However, the lawmaker who made such anti-woman statements on the floor of parliament, and his fellow legislators who virtually nodded approval to the democratically objectionable statements by way of allowing the statements to pass without any protest, were oblivious of quite a good number of the already mentioned constitutionally guaranteed fundamental rights of the female citizens.

Legally, as already shown, the female citizens of Bangladesh are not to be discriminated against in any sphere of life — social, political, cultural or economic. But practically they are deprived of equal rights and opportunities in all the spheres of life — the poor presence of women in the organs of the Bangladesh state in general, and the bias against the women in all the three organs of the state, as shown in Badhan’s case in particular, being the glaring examples. The People’s Republic of Bangladesh is actually Men’s Republic of Bangladesh.

Patriarchy: democracy’s worst enemy

Patriarchy is an ideology, a political ideology to be precise, which pre-supposes the natural superiority of male over female, and therefore upholds woman’s dependence on, and subordination to, man in all spheres of life — from the family organisation to the organisation of the state. Patriarchy, therefore, stands in the way of the liberal concept of the democratic emancipation of women, or in other words, the idea of ensuring a pervasive equality of man and woman in familial, social, political and economic spheres of life.

While a number of factors are cumulatively responsible for shaping the lives and attitudes of the women of Bangladesh, the predominant force in the social organisation of the country is patriarchy, which means that all sources of power and authority within the family, the society and the state remain essentially in the hands of the men.

Notably, Bangladesh has a 9.85 million strong female labour force, involved in garments, pottery, agriculture and other small industries, of which a total of 1.5 million are involved in the readymade garments industry. 29

But capitalist exploitation, combined with the patriarchal outlook of the capital owners, compels the female workers to receive wages which are less the half of what their male counterparts earn. While the average monthly pay of a male worker in the industrial sector is Tk 2,118, the average monthly pay of a female worker remains only Tk 1,007.30

Moreover, the patriarchal social division of labour between men and women does not free a Bangladeshi female wage-earner from her household responsibilities. If a female member of a family decides to work in an industry, she has to do that in addition to her patriarchy imposed housework, which include, along with many other tedious jobs, preparing meals for others members of the family, rearing of children, taking care of the ageing members if there are any, et cetera, and that too without the labour of housework being recognized economically productive – let alone paid.31 Still, she would not have absolute control over the money that she earns from working in a factory outside home, because the patriarchal man ‘not only controls a woman’s person, but also tends to control most of the household’s material resources, including the labour of female and junior members of the household…’.32

Kate Millett is absolutely right when she asserts that ‘patriarchy’s chief institution is the family. It is both a mirror of and a connection with the larger society; a patriarchal unit within a patriarchal whole…Serving as an agent of the larger society, the family not only encourages its own members to adjust and conform, but acts as a unit in the government of the patriarchal state which rules its citizens through its family heads’.33

To be more precise, ‘the home, like the nation, is essentially a heterosexual space and patriarchal overtones instill rigorously masculine or feminine identities. The parameters of home, its exclusions and inclusions, are analogous to the narratives of nations with their preoccupation with sexuality, loyalty, identity and image (New Age, 17.10.06).

SOS-arsenic.net

On the democratic emancipation of women

Men govern the nations primarily by birthright

Women’s democratic rights: state’s undemocratic responses

Badhan and the Executive

Badhan and the (lower) Judiciary

Badhan and the Executive

Badhan and the (lower) Judiciary

Badhan and the Legislature

Patriarchy: democracy’s worst enemy