Abstract:
This paper analyses the post‑Monsoon Revolution political settlement in Bangladesh by tracing how women’s central role in the 2024 July uprising was followed by their systematic exclusion from formal politics. Drawing on election data, media reporting, and feminist‑rights advocacy, it argues that the 2026 parliamentary polls, producing the lowest share of women MPs since independence, reveal not a temporary setback but a deliberate political order that tolerates gendered violence, preserves unequal family laws, and treats women’s representation as expendable. The article tracks women’s mobilization during the revolution, the backlash of everyday and digital violence after the fall of Sheikh Hasina’s regime, and the marginalization of the Women’s Affairs Reform Commission’s 423 reform proposals, including calls for 100 directly elected women’s seats and binding parity quotas. It then links these dynamics to Bangladesh’s obligations under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), showing how the persistence of reservations to Articles 2 and 16 and the failure to implement binding electoral quotas and robust protections against online and offline gender‑based violence undermine the democratic legitimacy of the “new Bangladesh.” The paper concludes by outlining concrete political demands, CEDAW‑consistent family‑law reform, the democratization of reserved seats, legally binding gender‑parity rules, and institutionalized feminist participation in constitutional reform, that would place women’s lives, rights, and leadership at the center of the country’s democratic refounding rather than at its margins.
Download the Full Paper here: Visible but Sidelined Women, Violence, and Representation in Post-Revolution Bangladesh