Bangladesh’s women have lost before the country has even voted

As Bangladesh prepares for its general election on 12 February – the first since the student-led uprising that toppled Sheikh Hasina as prime minister in July 2024 – it is confronted by the fragility of democratic transition. Some 128 million are eligible to vote, to choose whether the country moves towards genuine renewal or slides back into the same patterns that have defined its troubled political history. Amid this, an uncomfortable reality emerges: women constitute 49 percent of the electorate but barely 4 percent of the electoral candidates, with just 76 among the 1981 candidates contesting 300 parliamentary seats.

This underrepresentation shows how revolutionary moments can reproduce old hierarchies even as they overthrow old regimes. Here, the paths to democratic renewal remain deeply gendered in ways that theories of political transition rarely acknowledge. The absence of women from the ballot reinforces patriarchal norms and exclusionary elite pacts, and speaks to moralised and gendered political polarisation.

The transition from street mobilisation to institutional politics has historically been a graveyard of women’s aspirations. Bangladesh’s July Uprising required a break in the social order, including gender norms. But as the dust settled and the business of electoral politics began, the traditional gatekeepers of Bangladesh’s politics – male party bosses, male power brokers and male religious leaders – reassembled the barriers. The very qualities that made women effective revolutionaries during the uprising – refusing to adhere to hierarchical deference, disrupting  conservative notions of honour, staying out on the streets all day, standing arm to arm with men, even shaming them by their very presence in the street to take on a more radical stance – rendered them “risky” candidates in the eyes of risk-averse political parties at the time of the election. The results are as glaring as they are bitterly dispiriting.