Women stood up to power in Bangladesh and India. Then patriarchy returned

In July 2024, a young woman in Dhaka stood in front of a police prison van, trying to stop officers from taking away a fellow male student. Last month, during a “cockroach” protest in Mumbai’s Shivaji Park, a young woman stood in front of a police bus, refusing to move until officers released the students detained inside.

The uprisings in the two neighbouring countries were both driven by students and young people. One toppled an authoritarian regime two years ago, the other succeeded in making the education minister resign over leaked exam papers. In both movements, women stood alongside men, demanding the same changes; and not asking to be treated differently. In both countries, however, that solidarity of genders began to unravel within days of the protests’ end.

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The Daily Star’s analysis of 139 public social media posts targeting 15 prominent women of the July uprising found that nearly two out of three contained verbal abuse of a sexual tone or attacks on the women’s characters. And these were posted by accounts spanning the entire spectrum of Bangladeshi politics, not just supporters of any one political ideology. Awami League-linked pages branded protest leaders “razakars” or foreign agents; Jamaat and Chhatra Shibir-linked accounts called the same women “Shahbagi” and tied them to Delhi; BNP-linked accounts flipped the label and called them Jamaat sympathisers; and self-declared “Tawhidi” accounts denounced them simply for being secular. Of the 15 women, 12 faced verbal attacks from two or more rival camps at once. So, in a country like Bangladesh where these political factions usually oppose each other in every aspect, expressing sentiments of hate and contempt towards women is one activity they can participate in together.

The recent Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) protests in India, sparked by the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) paper-leak scandal, reflected what happened in Bangladesh in 2024. Model Rhiya Ahir, who stood before the police bus in Mumbai, was told she had no business protesting because of an old photograph of her in a bikini; a ruling-party functionary allegedly compared her, unfavourably, to an “Olympic silver medallist.” Other women, choosing anonymity, reported similar experiences: a content creator said the abuse began the moment she questioned the prime minister’s remarks after the protests ended. A college student and content creator who filmed a light-hearted video before a march found her face on television days later, while strangers tracked down her college and left threatening messages in her inbox. One activist said her father, a journalist, pleaded with her to stop speaking out—although it was not because of what she had said, but because of her Muslim identity.

Such instances of misogyny occur globally, but are particularly stronger in our region. A 2025 study by the Inter-Parliamentary Union interviewed 150 women lawmakers and parliamentary staff across 33 countries and found that 60 percent of respondents from the Asia-Pacific region had faced online hate speech, disinformation, image-based abuse, or the unauthorised release of personal information. Bangladesh and India are two of the clearest illustrations of this regional pattern.

Such abuse evidently excludes women from various forms of participation. A recent policy brief from UN Women said that, in Bangladesh, violence against women in politics (VAWP) remains a serious barrier to their participation in electoral, party, institutional, and digital spaces. In the two years since the July uprising, such exclusion has calcified into structure. Besides the dedicated Women’s Reform Commission, the other 10 reform commissions had 97 members—only 15 of whom were women, while not a single commission was chaired by a woman. No political party met its pledge, under the July National Charter, to field women candidates for 5 percent of parliamentary seats; where parties did include women, it was overwhelmingly through reserved seats rather than contests they were encouraged to fight and win. Female students from Dhaka University who broke the dormitory gates during the 2024 uprising, far from being enabled to participate in nation rebuilding, are still having to fight for the right to have 24-hour unrestricted access to their own dorms.

Across the border, in India, the same pattern is unfolding: women who joined the protests last month now find themselves missing from what the protests achieved. On August 11, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) West Bengal State Committee hosted a panel discussion in Kolkata on the movement. All India Students’ Association’s (AISA) president Neha Bora was invited as the chief speaker, but the panel was criticised for featuring no woman activist from the city itself.

At the social media platform level, Meta narrowed its hateful conduct rules in 2025, so protection against gendered cursing now applies only when the target is a minor. But The Daily Star’s aforementioned analysis found that roughly a third of the gendered slurs targeting the women in its dataset fall outside what Meta still commits to removing for adult women. In India, the pressure is more visibly tied to the state’s own surveillance apparatus—AI-enabled vans, facial-recognition glasses and, according to a petition filed by former Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union’s president Aishe Ghosh, a permanent camera tower at Jantar Mantar that recorded women in wet clothing during the monsoon rain. A narrower internet platform rule and a camera tower are different tools which both ensure that being visible in public costs women more than it costs the men marching beside them.

In both Bangladesh and India, once a woman refuses to be quietened, her family becomes the next target. In Dhaka, one MP’s home address and phone number were published as part of a coordinated pile-on. Meanwhile, the Indian Foundation for Internet and Society (IFF) has filed complaints with the National Commission for Women and the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights over a coordinated online campaign which has targeted several women protesters. According to the complaint, women were doxxed, their phone numbers and home addresses circulated, and altered images of them were spread online. One 15-year-old girl reportedly had an apology extracted at her doorstep and broadcast on television.

In speaking to The Daily Star, Shima Akhter, who was injured during the 2024 uprising, said men were remembered as the heroes of July while women who had done identical work were branded as “sluts.” She believes this should be seen as a deliberate warning to the next generation of women thinking about entering politics or public spaces. A law student in Kolkata, organising protesters in India, described patriarchy as the perfect tool for exactly this reason: character assassination is easier than confronting an argument you cannot win. Even Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision to publicly forgive the young women who had “insulted” him is a softer version of the same outlook. The latter casts them not as adversaries to be argued with but as children to be pardoned, thus stripping them of the political standing their male co-protesters are able to own.

The examples from Bangladesh and India show us that men may stand beside women when a movement needs bodies, courage, and numbers; but once the movement is over, women are often made to pay a higher price for having been there. The line between protest and politics may shift, governments may change, and movements may claim victory, but the old warning rings the same across borders: a woman who becomes visible in public can be made to regret it. It is high time this trend changed.

Jannatul Naym Pieal is a writer, researcher, and journalist. He can be reached at jn.pieal@gmail.com.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own. 

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