THE concept of patriarchy and patriarchal structures have been central in guiding feminist scholarship and practice since its early years, helping us understand how social institutions and structures with gendered norms informed sexual discrimination and resultant violence. However, contemporary realities and scholarship have made it imperative to recognize that recent trends of violence are a result not of static social structures but of the way that these structures themselves get constructed or reconstructed in the battlefield of politics. That the nature of such politics can be woven around notions of sexuality (cultural notions of masculinity and femininity, for example, ‘boys will be boys’) or that sexuality can inform the nature of violence itself (such as sex trafficking or honour killing) has become an important theoretical touchstone for second-wave feminism.¹

Feminists have moved on further to look at the issue of sexual violence in a more multilayered and complex way. Third World or post-structuralist feminists have contested and interrogated the ‘originary status’ of western feminism and located the sites of sexual politics in postcolonial diversity, as well as foregrounded and centrally located texts by women of colour in feminist scholarship.²

Additionally, the narrative of sexual violence is (often) viewed through the lens of feminist notions of justice (or at least components of it), and hence raises questions of impunity that is also perceived as being multilayered and complex. Impunity is not only conceived at the systemic or institutional level of laws and jurisprudence through which a particular crime or violation goes unpunished, but also located at the individual, community and societal level, where the very nature and conditions of sexual violence lend themselves to a silencing process, or at the minimum, a reluctance to address them head on. At the more familial and pedagogic level, impunity is also moulded through the systematic privileging of the male child and the normalization of domestic violence.

Sexual violence and impunity are integral to the history of Bangladesh as a nation born out of a nine-month war in 1971 and a struggle that spans decades. In the course of its emergence as a new sovereign state, Bangladesh had inherited structures from both the British colonial and Pakistani state, some of which, like the military and the bureaucracy, had created a privileged middle class within Bengali society. In many cases, the structures themselves had contributed towards sustaining violence. In other cases, violence had resulted due to processes of structural transformation, such as modernization, globalization and the consequent disarticulation of a traditional peasant society.

 

A small but burgeoning literature exists on the gendered analyses of the state that reveals how both violence against women as well as sexual violence are embedded in the very same state structures.³ The distinct characteristics of the process of nation building in Bangladesh, on the other hand, are movements for democracy and struggles of resistance, which stem from the Language Movement from 1952, the Autonomy Movement throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971 and, even after its independence, the Anti-Autocracy Movement against the Ershad regime.

Whereas these movements occurred at the national level, others have been sustained by socio-political forces as anti-fundamentalist movements, the movement to bring war criminals to justice, and bring to an end their impunity at different historical junctures. The women’s movement has engaged in them, albeit in ways that articulate the dualities and tensions of these movements as perceived through a gendered lens. On the one hand, it cannot be denied that the struggles of democratic institutions and practices have strengthened the backbone of the women’s movement in Bangladesh and especially given it strength to work within a frame of a civic discourse. On the other hand, the generic and gender-neutral orientation, and indeed, in some cases misogyny, in the content and claims of the nationalist movements, have led to a sustained critique from women themselves. This has resulted in a field of feminist practice that time and again has surfaced to resist and challenge impunities embedded in the patriarchal structures of Bangladeshi society.

 

It is important to address the structural dynamics of impunity at the individual and societal level, looking at the conditions that go into the creation of impunity and also the elements that fuel it, and to enquire as to what helps it become so embedded that it is almost invisible. Impunity has human costs, ecological costs, global and national costs. In cases of sexual violence, impunity prolongs the suffering of victims by creating obstructions to justice. In failing to address environmental justice, it incurs irreparable damage and cost in both the national and global arena. When we fail to recognize rape as a form of torture in one conflict area, it can lead to it being adopted by perpetrators in another conflict area, globally as well as nationally, located within the same body politic.

Thus, in Bangladesh, the failure to redress rape victims in 1971 can often be said to lead to rape as military strategy in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT). It is usually said that when the oppressed cannot find justice, they often turn into oppressors themselves. Many Bengalis who suffered atrocity at the hands of Pakistani soldiers during the Liberation War of 1971 but did not get redress from them, turned into perpetrators of such crimes when conducting a state sanctioned ‘counter-insurgency’ warfare led by the Bangladeshi military against indigenous peoples in the CHT, who were demanding autonomy of the region.⁴

 

Sexual violence, in turn, may form part of a greater cycle of impunity. Rape or even the rumour of rape is used by establishment forces to counter resistance, since it creates panic among the resisting community. Targeting ‘innocents’ (militarily defined as women, dependants and children) and causing them to flee their homes and shelter destroys the last vestiges of civil society in a conflict zone. During the post-partition communal riots and even in present-day Bangladesh, actual incidents or even rumours of sexual harassment of minority women have caused communities to migrate across borders, often instantaneously, and sometimes at the cost of having to sell their lands at dirt cheap prices. Such a situation has also taken place in the CHT.⁵ Systemic structures such as politico-legal administrative units, often fail to deal with sexual violence effectively because they themselves have imbibed this structure in which impunity is strengthened and victims suffer it at the existential level because there is no option.

Two distinct sites of sexual violence may be characterized: one in the public sphere and one in the private or domestic sphere. The first may be further distinguished as: (a) that occurring during wartime or conflict (such as intra- or inter-ethnic or caste based); and (b) that occurring in public spaces during peacetime or during the everyday conduct of people’s lives.

 

Conflict related sexual violence is perpetrated by combatants, including rebels, militias and government forces. Various forms of sexual violence can be used systematically in conflicts to torture, injure, extract information, degrade, threaten, intimidate or punish. Sexual violence can in such cases amount to being a weapon of war. Such characteristics of war can also be ‘normalized’ in everyday life as outward manifestations of gendered, racial, ethnic and caste based discrimination. Domestic sexual violence is that which is perpetrated by intimate partners and by other family/household members, and is often termed intimate partner violence. This kind of sexual violence is widespread both during conflict and in peace-time. It is commonly believed that incidence of domestic sexual violence increase in wartime and in post-conflict environments.

It must be reiterated that grey areas persist between and within areas of violence, gender based violence and sexual violence. Patriarchal structures that permeate each society both help to trigger and institutionalize values that legitimize sexual violence. Sexual violence, in turn, may form an act that helps strengthen gender discrimination as it is pervasive in the transmission of media images. Further, there may be terrains skirting patriarchy, where violence occurs and they may be sexual but not gendered in any heteronormative sense, for example, prison rapes.

In the Bangladesh context, all the aforementioned sites appear with questions of impunity interlocked in their narratives. The two most cited conflict situations in the literature on sexual violence are the 1971 Liberation War and the CHT movement for autonomy and its aftermath.

The 1971 Liberation War was somewhat foundational in shaping the subsequent discourse on sexual violence in Bangladesh. Women activists and scholars had to wage a two-pronged struggle when addressing issues of rape and sexual violence. The first was to inscribe women’s proactive role in the war into a male-dominant nationalist paradigm of history, as well as to redefine rape and sexual violence as visible crimes against humanity from a feminist perspective. The literature and activism on this aspect of the struggle remain vibrant in Bangladesh. This is evident in many of the activities of women’s organizations that have sought to recognize women as freedom fighters equal in status to men, regardless of whether they fought in battle alongside men or gave support in numerous ways, such as taking part in reconnaissance activities, hiding and supplying arms, cooking meals for them or tending to them as nurses.

 

The second struggle is both more subtle and one that exists in an embryonic form. It is one where feminist notions contest nationalist paradigms and seek solutions that are not to be found within nationalist symbols or parameters. The trials and tribulations that women experienced during the war often could not be understood through the lens of nationalism. For example, why did women who were raped and imprisoned by Pakistani soldiers opt to flee with them to Pakistan and not stay at home and face the shame and guilt thrown upon them by friends, family and society? Such questions lead us to explore gendered notions of sexuality in Bengali society and how they reproduce feelings of shame and guilt for the rape victims of the war. Neither the analysis nor the solutions are to be found in nationalist discourses.

Hence, we see that the term birangona (war heroine), which was declared by A.H.M. Kamruzzaman, the home minister in the post-independence period with the intent to give dignity to the women who were raped, was easily subverted by the ‘man in the street’ through a simple pun: ‘Era ki birangona na barangona?’ (Are they war heroines or prostitutes?). This was something that was related to me by Nilima Ibrahim, author of Ami Birangona Bolchi (This is a Birangona Speaking),⁶ and a family friend. The very punning on the term in this manner bespoke of the simple lack of dignity that existing societal values offered women.

 

It was also interesting to note that most post-war films that talked about rape portrayed women in pitiful circumstances who either had to be given respectability through marriage or ended up committing suicide. For a few years, film directors continued to speak in this genre of shame and guilt with respect to rape, and then suddenly there was a silence that lasted till the 1990s. Silence too was part of this discourse, where sexual violence against other communities, such as Bihari or ethnic women, was not discussed and hence remained invisible.

In brief, we can say that the search for finding a feminist perspective of sexual violence in the Liberation War has barely begun. The underlying conditions of breaking silences may be varied for different societies as much of what is cultural is factored in the process. There is, however, a common strand evident in the retelling of any history and that is brilliantly articulated in Maya Angelou’s poem, ‘On the Pulse of Morning’: History, despite its wrenching pain, Cannot be unlived, and if faced with courage, Need not be lived again.⁷

 

In other words, history cannot be told or retold without confronting pain or courage, the pain of confronting known truths with new realities and the courage to break that silence. Individual memories through an intricate process of storytelling and legend building may fit in organically with collective memories (or mainstream thinking or official histories), or again, they may not. We witness such individual reminiscences of victims and fighters periodically during national day celebrations. But in the play of power (that is, those who control the media, education or, broadly speaking, production of culture), some stories get valorized over others, thus influencing the direction of history. Aspects of Partition history in South Asia or the Liberation War in Bangladesh too bear this resemblance.

However, individual memories also have a potential for playing the subversive role of deconstructing some of the collective legends through creative translation. Artists in general facilitate the translation of memory or recall of events even decades after that event is over. Masterpiece films on the World Wars, even a hundred years on, still hold us spellbound, not so much as a documentation of the events or an informed retelling of history, but as an emotional reconnection with events based on principles that transcend time and space – principles such as humanity or a rediscovery of truths, which the conscious mind had so far denied or not previously acknowledged.

Collective memories are all too often conflated with national memories or national consciousness. The reasons are obvious. The emergence of the nation state came with all the power of the state, which was deemed to control a unifying process of bringing a nation together, ideally under the aegis of one single, broader identity. Whosoever is in control of state power uses the same marker, albeit with their own constructed legends and polemics. But on the other hand, if you ask a Dalit in India, a Buddhist in Bangladesh or a Sindhi in Pakistan what her or his markers of consciousness are, they can be very different from their respective national polemics.

 

Exploring further, if you asked women of any community in Bangladesh, or India or Pakistan, what their markers of consciousness were, the responses vary even more. More than grand-scale political events, they would relate stories of when they could wear a bindi on their foreheads without fear or when schools stopped becoming concentration camps, or perhaps for a future generation of garments factory workers in Bangladesh, it would be the ‘great disaster of Rana Plaza.’ Their responses could also tell you about the nearness and the distance of the state from their own daily lives. The long and short of it is that collective memory may be very different from the state sponsored national discourses and debates on memories. They, in fact, may be broader, more complex and run parallel to or in opposition to national discourses and hence failed to get integrated into it. But that is not to say they do not exist. They manifest themselves in the movements and uprisings that surface at different periods, often demanding recognition both of the memories as well as the realities that they represent.

 

Much of the literature on the 1971 Liberation War can be read and reread in the context of conflicts that have occurred globally in recent years: Serbia, Bosnia, Kashmir and subsequent developments in Bangladesh, as in the CHT. The militarized conflict in this region manifested itself as a movement for autonomy from the perspectives of ethnic groups who identified themselves as Jummas and from the perspective of the state that identified it as counter-insurgency warfare. Even when a peace accord was signed (1997), the aftermath was described in military terms as a low-intensity conflict, whilst ethnic people in the CHT called it a non-implementation of the promises made.

Raja Devasish Roy, Shapan Adnan and Ranajit Dastidar, and Amena Mohsin have produced important work where they critically engage with the Bangladeshi state on the notion of indigenous concepts of landownership, self-administration and cultural hegemony.⁸ Guhathakurta brings in the gendered dimension of the conflict and critiques the mainstream women’s movement based on perceptions of peace building by intertwining class, ethnicity and gender in identity politics.⁹ After this, many others have started writing on ethnicity and gender.¹⁰

 

Women’s writings have foregrounded questions of justice and peace drawn from the analysis of the 1971 war and explored the CHT crises in the same vein.¹¹ The changing connotation of sexual violence in the Hills in a new landscape where Bengali settlers and indigenous peoples live as uneasy neighbours has also been analysed and discussed.¹² In addition, women’s movements both in the Bangladeshi mainstream rights movement as well as among indigenous organizations have focused attention on the growth of gender based violence against indigenous women, and thus argued for looking at issues such as land grabbing, militarization and ethno-politics from a gendered perspective. Current research in conflict and post-conflict situations in Bangladesh, therefore, have come to influence studies of rape, assault, abduction and other forms of violence against women in mainstream society in both public and domestic spaces.

What this kind of literature illustrates is that sexual violence encompasses violations and offences that are considered deeply personal, intimate and, hence, fall outside the public space. Thus, it becomes doubly difficult to gain clarity and objectivity when these are being brought out into the open. This is to be seen especially in local level village arbitrations, where women have traditionally been left out, although in some areas this is slowly changing. In a nationwide empirical study conducted by Research Initiatives, Bangladesh, on the importance and necessity of the Hindu Marriage Law, it was seen that most women who were interviewed preferred to have problems relating to domestic abuse, neglect or violence settled within the family.¹³

 

Most said that if they took their complaints to the local arbitration councils, they would be defeated because being married women, the council would be headed by elders of their in-laws’ village and, naturally, their husbands’ side of the story would be more privileged than theirs. A woman would only be seen to have an edge in the process if she had a father or brother (in short, a male guardian) who was either well off or embedded in the village power structure. On the other hand, while legal aid organizations, where they existed, were of some assistance, very few women could avail of such facilities due to their marginalization in terms of wealth and education. The prevalence of fatwas, issued by and large for transgressions of a ‘personal’ nature usually relating to women (for example, adultery, mixed marriage, elopement, etc.), makes the biases of power structures even more noticeable.

But the situation is evolving. In recent years, women have been seen to be more vocal about domestic violence than before. In a nationwide survey of Hindu women on questions of linking gender violence with compulsory registration of marriage,¹⁴ over 50 per cent admitted to having been physically abused by their husbands or close family members. This could have been the result of years of mobilization by grassroots organizations or the increased exposure to education and media. The enactment of the new Domestic Violence Act has also come as a result of proactive mobilization by women’s and legal aid organizations. It is a strong act that brings in many innovative dimensions to the arena of legal redress for sexual violence in domestic spheres. At the same time, it is a new act that still needs to be understood, internalized and used by most practitioners as well as by victims.

 

After all the analyses, can we come to a consensus on actionable points on how women’s movements can address issues of impunity of sexual violence? One of the first steps is to address the deep silence that surrounds sexual violence at both the individual and societal level. Sensitive research and fact-finding through innovative methods should be undertaken, and with that goes building capacity among the younger generation on using such methods.

The fact that there is major state collusion in questions of impunity is almost self-evident. Feminists as well as political analysts in general need to engage in a more structural analysis of such collusion, in areas of conflict as well as at the level of policymaking and the day-to-day implementation of such policies. This should lead to a clear directive to policy advocates on how and where to tackle issues of impunity in their lobbying activities.

 

Even without state collusion, impunity is often granted to perpetrators by way of patriarchal kinship patterns, which, in turn, are frequently embedded in judicial norms and regulations. Hence, there is a need to strategize how long-standing legal, social and moral impunity embedded in society can be questioned and upturned through a series of well thought out actions, resulting in polemical debate and discursive practice.

We now turn to questions of justice. There is no one understanding of justice among the stakeholders that seeks an end to sexual violence. Many existing notions of justice are debated, for example, the death penalty. Before one goes into arguments on this, it is important to first understand from survivors’ perspectives what they mean by justice and what their notion of reparation is. Is it financial or psychological? Is it a mere acknowledgement of the crimes committed or is it the direction to live in dignity without denial of the pain that they had to suffer? There has been no self-sustained research on this in Bangladesh, and without such research, it is not possible to make any effective impact on future policies.

How do we learn from both individual and collective memories of sexual violence? How do we create a knowledge base so that people can learn from it? How do we go about this in the absence of a common code through which to communicate it to others? Women’s organizations must adopt a concerted strategy to take the subject from research to a more actionable platform through which a social practice can be formed that is at the same time grounded and visionary.

 

There is much to learn from efforts in the regional and international arena, for example, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Yugoslavia, where there has been acknowledgement of rape as a crime against society. At the same time, there is a need to dissect why we have not been able to harness this in our country. Thus, when both the desire and challenge for change come, we should be ready to offer homegrown solutions and strategies that are evidence based and not simply offered in toto from systems outside our own. If we look to the success of the Beijing Conference in declaring rape as a war crime, we are actually looking at the years of hard work that feminists (researchers, lawyers and scholars) have put into this notion.

 

Footnotes:

1. K. Millet, Sexual Politics. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Press, Champaign, 1970.

2. M.J. Alexander and Chandra T. Mohanty, Feminist Genealogies: Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures. Routledge, New York, 1997.

3. R. Ahmed, ‘Women’s Movement in Bangladesh and the Left’s Understanding of the Woman Question’, Journal of Social Studies 30, October 1985, pp. 41-56; Hameeda Hossain, Meghna Guhathakurta and Malini Sur, Freedom From Fear, Freedom From Want? Rethinking Security in Bangladesh (mimeo). Rupa, New Delhi, 2008.

4. M. Guhathakurta, ‘The Bangladesh Liberation War: A Summon to Memory’, in Abul Kalam (ed.), Bangladesh: Internal Dynamics and External Linkages. University Press, Dhaka, 1996, pp. 20-31.

5. M. Guhathakurta, ‘Women’s Narratives from the Chittagong Hill Tracts’, in Rita Manchanda (ed.), Women, War and Peace in South Asia: Beyond Victimhood to Agency. Sage, New Delhi, 2001, pp. 254-93; M. Guhathakurta, ‘The Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) Accord and After: Gendered Dimensions of Peace’, in Donna Pankhurst (ed.), Gendered Peace: Women’s Struggles for Post-War Justice and Reconciliation, (Chapter 7). Routledge, London, 2008.

6. Nilima Ibrahim, Ami Birangona Bolchi. Jagriti Prokashoni, Dhaka, 1998.

7. M. Angelou, ‘On the Pulse of Morning’, 1993. http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/on-the-pulse-of-morning-2/(accessed 18 July 2015). Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. Penguin, Harmonds-worth, 1975.

8. Raja Devasish Roy, ‘The Discordant Accord: Challenges Towards the Implementation of the Chittagong Hill Tracts Accord of 1997’, Journal of Social Studies 6, April-June 2003 (100th issue – ‘Perspectives on Peace: Visions and Realities’), pp. 4-57; Shapan Adnan and Ranajit Dastidar, Alienation of the Lands of Indigenous Peoples in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. Chittagong Hill Tracts Commission and International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, Dhaka, 2011; Amena Mohsin, The Politics of Nationalism: The Case of the Chittagong Hill Tracts. University Press, Dhaka, 2002.

9. M. Guhathakurta, 1996, op. cit., fn. 4; M. Guhathakurta, 2001, op. cit., fn. 5.

Ain o Salish Kendra (ASK), Narir Ekattor: Juddhoporoborti Kothhokahini (Women’s ’71: Post-War Voices/Stories). Ain o Salish Kendra, Dhaka, 2001.

10. Ehsani Chakravarty and Ayoob Ali, The Hidden Matrix: Women’s Position and Gender Relations in Adibashi Societies. Pathok Shomabesh, Dhaka, 2009; Tania Haque, ‘Militarization and the Fate of Women’s Body: A Case Study of the Chittagong Hill Tracts’, in A. Mohsin and Imtiaz Ahmed (eds.), Women and Militancy: South Asian Complexities. University Press, Dhaka, 2011, pp. 41-59.

11. M. Guhathakurta, 1996, op. cit., fn. 4; Amena Mohsin, ‘Women, Peace and Justice: A Chronology of Denials’, Journal of Social Studies 100, April-June 2003, pp. 55-71.

12. M. Guhathakurta, ‘Cartographic Anxieties, Identity Politics and the Imperatives of Bangladesh Foreign Policy’, Peace Prints: South Asian Journal of Peacebuilding 3(2), 2010, pp. 41-53.

13. M. Guhathakurta, Korban Ali, Sipra Goswami, Md Saidur Rahman, Babul Chandra Sutradhar, Manasi Chakma, Sabita Rani Haldar, Beuti Haldar, Rakhi Saha, Purnima Modak, Jharna Bepary, Israfil Bepary, Nusrat Jahan Chowdhury and Biplob Das, ‘Study on the Necessity and Importance of Hindu Marriage Law’. Unpublished report, Research Initiatives, Dhaka, 2012.

14. Ibid.

 

References:

B. D’Costa, Marginalization and Impunity: Violence among Women and Girls in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Chittagong Hill Tracts Commission, Dhaka, 2014.

Eva Gerharz, ‘Indigenous Activism in Bangladesh: Translocal Spaces and Shifting Constellations of Belonging’, Asian Ethnicity 15(4), 2014, pp. 552-70.

J. Alamgir and Bina D’Costa, ‘The 1971 Genocide: War Crimes and Political Crimes’, Economic and Political Weekly 46(13), 2011, pp. 38-41.

M. Guhathakurta, ‘Families, Displacement’ (bilingual), in Divided Countries, Separated Cities, 19/20, Transeuropeennes: International Journal of Critical Thought, Paris, Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homm, 2001.

Nayanika Mookherjee, The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories and the Bangladesh War of 1971. Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2015.

R. Moyeen, Bakkha Bandana (In Praise of Women’s Breasts). Rahman, Dhaka, 1989.

Shaheen Akhter, Suraiya Begum, Meghna Guhathakurta, Hameeda Hossain and Sultana Kamal (eds), Rising from the Ashes: Women’s Narratives of 1971. UPL, Dhaka, 2012.