AFTER months of uncertainty and confusion, Bangladesh is finally gearing up for elections. Perhaps theonly certainty in these uncertain times is that no matter which party wins, a woman will once again take over the reins of government.
Bangladesh is perhaps the only nation in South Asia where the leaders of all three major parties happen to be women. Apart from Prime Minister Khaleda Zia of the ruling Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and Shiekh Hasina Wajed, chief of the main opposition Awami League, the latest entrant in the field is Raushan Ershad, wife of imprisoned dictator, General Hussain Mohammed Ershad. Nearly six months after she was appointed a member of the Jatiya Party presidium, the highest policy-making body of the party, she is poised to take over the helm of the party that her husband founded about a year after he seized power in a military coup in 1982. Charged and found guilty of corruption by a special tribunal after a mass uprising led to her husband's downfall in 1990, she was granted bail by the high court a few months later, and was quickly accepted as a powerful presence in her husband's party.
Most observers, however, feel the issue is just a matter of political inheritance, a familiar scenario in the subcontinent. "Women leaders in Bangladesh owe their rise to political prominence not to their education or political acumen but simply to the fact that they happen to be the relatives of powerful men," says Professor Serajul Islam Choudhury, a leading columnist and political commentator.
Except for Raushan Ershad, the others were mere housewives with no political grounding. But they had the advantage of having powerful husbands or fathers. Raushan Ershad wielded enormous influ-ence during her husband's nine-year rule, but she spent little time to groom herself for a future role in politics.
All three leaders found the mantle on them simply because their husbands or fathers had no male heir apparent. Thus, by sheer coincidence, all three women were thrust into positions of leadership for the same ostensible reason: to save the parties from disintegrating due to the fierce factional feuding that followed the departure of their party founder. Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, 50, was made chairperson of the BNP in 1983, two years after her husband, General Zia-ur-Rehman, was assassinated in office in 1981. His two sons were too young at the time of his death to be considered for office.
Shiekh Hasina, 48, was catapulted to presidentship of the Awami League in 1981. This was nearly six years after her father, Shiekh Mujibur Rehman, founder of Bangladesh and its first prime minister, and more than a dozen family members (including his three sons) were brutally killed by renegade army officers in 1975.
But these women have their share of critics. Says Maulana Matiur Rahman Nizami, secretary of the Jamaat-e-Islami "Bangladesh is a predominantly Muslim country. There's no place in Islam for women to govern the country. This development underscores the negative politics in the country and it can never bring any good to the nation as they did not come to power through any natural process." While the statement is defini-tely sexist, there is an element of truth in it, for since the birth of Bangladesh, none of these parties has practised democracy within its rank and file. As the zealots note, the current political crisis has been caused by the negative politics practised by the women leaders.
