Women are playing key roles in protests across South Asia. The backlash they face is often heavily gendered
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Meghamala Ghosh went along to one of them with her mother. But staying out so late went against every self-preservation impulse the 23-year-old had learned as a young woman in a country afflicted by endemic sexual violence.
“As soon as it was 12, I felt ‘It’s getting too late, it’s getting too late, it’s getting too late,’” she said. “This is a constant thing that’s going on in my head.”
As the pair traveled home in an e-rickshaw, a group of men waved the vehicle to a halt and began surrounding it, shouting and leering at them on the deserted road. Unsure whether she could trust the driver, Ghosh tightly gripped the kitchen knife she had brought with her for protection.
The driver managed to speed away, and dropped them home safely.
Instead of leaving energized by the sight of thousands of women on the streets at the late hour, Ghosh was left thinking: “How can we reclaim the night when the night was never ours to begin with?”
Several other protesters reported being intimidated and harassed by men who invaded the demonstration and told them to go home.
The event was part of a wave of increasing participation and leadership from women in protests across South Asia, activists and organizers say. But just as notable is a gendered backlash to that wave, involving tactics seemingly intended to subdue female dissent.
Tools of Repression
“Women have always been involved in protests in places like India, Bangladesh and Pakistan but the difference is that they’re taking on more leadership roles and are the primary actors,” Heather Barr, associate director of Human Rights Watch’s women’s rights division, said
“In Afghanistan, for example, the only social resistance the Taliban is currently facing is from women.”
Since the 2021 fall of Kabul to the Taliban, women have seen their rights restricted across the board, including recent restrictions on their voices in public.
While misogyny and marginalization afflict women’s lives the world over, conservative social attitudes to gender can be particularly pronounced in South Asia.
In Bangladesh, women deal with daily harassment, says Nazifa Jannat, a student and political activist. And she doesn’t see this improving anytime soon. “When you’re walking on the road you constantly feel eyes on you, whether it’s a busy market or a deserted road,” she said.
According to Deanne Uyangoda, protection coordinator in Asia Pacific for NGO Front Line Defenders, while women have always been integral to protest movements in South Asia, “their role in co-creating those spaces and in organizing, mobilizing building trust and building framing of why these protests are happening” has become more pronounced.