The Case For Absolute Equality Of Women & Men in Bangladesh

Riaz Osmani

5 May 2025

Bangladesh’s Interim Government’s Chief Adviser Professor Yunus had recently appointed a Women’s Affairs Reform Commission, which has recently submitted its report to the Chief Adviser. After some of the report’s recommendations appeared in the media, the country’s fundamentalist Islamic group called Hefazat-e-Islam called for the disbandment of the Commission.

This is due to some demands of a personal nature to do with women that were considered un-Islamic. One such demand was the right to equal inheritance as men. Let’s dive into the politics of it all.

In Bangladesh, outside of the Penal Code (which deals with general criminality), we have a set of Civil Laws which contain Personal Laws, some codified and some not. It is these Personal Laws that govern issues of marriage, divorce, inheritance etc. This is where religious edicts come in for Muslims, Hindus, Christians etc. which are all different and discriminate against women in their own ways.

The only way to remove these varying degrees of religion based discrimination from Bangladesh’s legal system is by replacing the Civil Laws (which contain the religion based Personal Laws), with a new fully coded and uniform Civil Code.

In this new Civil Code, men and women would enjoy equal facilities when it came to the benefits of marrigage, divorce, inheritance etc. There would be no religion based discrimination left in Bangladesh’s legal system. Men and women of all religions in Bangladesh would have this Civil Code equally applicable to them, be they Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Buddhist and others. Men would not be subject to any new discrimination.

This is where all the difficulty would arise. In Bangladesh’s legal system which is based on the secular British Common Law, the area of Personal Law is the only area where religious edicts have been put in place, be they Muslim, Hindu, Christian etc. (it was the British rulers who did this out of presumed necessity).

Would Muslims or Hindus who have always obeyed these religious instructions in the areas of marriage, divorce, inheritance etc. be willing to see them eliminated from the legal system? Many Muslim women may wish to, since they would no longer have to contend with just half the amount of inheritance as that of their brothers.

Many Hindu women would be happy too, since under a uniform Civil Code, they would for the first time be able to divorce their husbands! So who would be the obstacles to these legal changes? The answer is obviously men who have enjoyed religiously sanctioned privileges that they would now be set to lose.

This explains Hefazat’s screaming! Groups such as these (and many moderate ones too) would see to it that Bangladesh never gets a uniform Civil Code. Even men who support equality for women may simply not be able to contend with the elimination of the Personal Laws out of strong religious beliefs (same with women). Yet, unless that can be achieved, women in Bangladesh will never achieve full equality with men.

Special Update: Soon after publishing of this blog, I had the pleasure of watching an interview on a private Bangladeshi TV channel where a couple of the members of the Commission were interviewed. That is where they went at great lengths to explain that existing Personal Laws would not be touched.

What they have proposed is an optional non-religious Civil Code containing non-religious Personal Laws for those who wish to opt-in to it. It would be based on absolute equality in all personal spheres. This is a novel idea that is definitely worth a lot of consideration.