Bangladesh – Women & Property Rights – Inheritance Laws Unjust

It is young women who stitch garments worth $20 billion in exports, women
who own Grameen Bank, an embattled but Nobel-winning micro-lender, and women
who have ruled the country as prime ministers since 1991—longer than men have
managed, which might make Bangladesh unique in the history of the world’s
republics.

Yet look at distribution of land by gender and you might be surprised. There
is a very short answer to the question “Who owns Bangladesh?” Men do.

No one knows exactly how unequal the distribution of property is (the
government does not disaggregate its statistics by gender). But there is
agreement that the share held by women is absolutely tiny. In 1993, the UN’s
Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) estimated
that women in Bangladesh owned just 3.5% of the country’s agricultural land.
Twenty years on, this share has almost certainly shrunk further, to perhaps as little as 2%.

Bangladesh’s legal system is secular on paper, but the areas of marriage,
divorce, alimony and property inheritance are based on what is called personal
law, which varies according to an individual’s or family’s religion. Muslim
women are allowed to buy or be gifted property or access to khas land
(fallow plots owned by the government), but the main route through which they
acquire it is inheritance. (Following Hindu custom, Hindu and Buddhist women
inherit nothing). The Islamic laws of inheritance are based on the local school
of sharia, wherein a daughter is bequeathed only half what her brother
inherits. Even a single generation of marriages and deaths does its bit to
distribute land away from women. A widow receives one-eighth of her husband’s
property if they have children and one-fourth if they do not.

But to concentrate on the unfairness of the inheritance laws would be to
ignore the broad majority of women (and men)—approximately two-thirds of
Bangladesh’s 160m people are landless. Imagine if seats on a public bus of the
standard size were distributed in the same way that Bangladesh’s productive
land is. The conductor would have reserved only a single seat for all the women
who might board. But he would be holding no tickets at all for two additional
busloads of people, left waiting at the kerb.

Often women do not claim any of their inheritance, leaving it in their
brothers’ possession. Activists in Bangladesh call it the “good-sister
syndrome”: hoping that the brother will look after his sister’s rights. In
their experience, more often than not “the good brother does not reciprocate in
the way the good sister anticipated”.

In a study titled “Women, land
and power in Bangladesh” Jenneke Arens, a Dutch researcher, finds that
sons and husbands are often at fault.

Khadija, rich peasant widow, called me into her house. She was clearly
upset: ‘I inherited nine bigha (three acres) of land from my mama
(uncle) who brought me up, but my sons have registered my land in their names,
they took my fingerprint.’

The injustice has not gone unnoticed. There was a move towards a uniform
family law in the early 1980s, one that would respect the rights of women and
men equally, or at least less unequally. The Awami League (AL) of Sheikh Hasina
pushed for it when it was in government in the late 1990s and between 2007 and
2008 an army-backed government drafted legislation to give women equal access,
use and control of land. Indeed in its 2008
election manifesto the AL, which holds office once again, had vowed to
rectify “discriminatory laws [that are] against the interest of women”. But
that item remained on the “to-do-list” of the same AL government that came to
power after winning a landslide victory in late 2008. (It has however made some
progress in other areas, such as protecting women from sexual harassment and
violence.)

Various plans to change the inheritance laws have been met with violent
protest by the Islamic right. It appears that even the AL government cannot
afford to enforce the constitution in this matter; it calls for women to be
recognised as having equal rights in every sphere of life. (The opposition
Bangladesh Nationalist Party, which is strategically aligned with the conservative
right, does not bother in the first place.) “Politicians are afraid to touch
religion because they are afraid of losing votes, says Khushi Kabir of Nijera
Kori (“We do it ourselves”), an NGO that fights for the rights of landless
people. The formation in 2011 of a fundamentalist group called Hefazat-e-Islam
(“Protectors of Islam”) was a direct response to a plan for legislation which
would ensure that all descendents inherit equal portions of an estate. And so
the AL’s three-fourths majority has made little difference.

The prospects for change look gloomy. But, as Ms Kabir says, “with the
exception of inheritance laws, we are much better off than Pakistan.” She
points to some of Bangladesh’s relatively progressive policies, including some
that favour augmenting women’s access to public land, as well as a judiciary
that is much more sympathetic to women’s rights than Pakistan’s.

The government has also set in motion a project to digitise all of
Bangladesh’s land records (the European Commission has chipped in €10m, or
$13.3m). This will be very good, Ms Kabir thinks, because making the public
records transparent would make women’s claim official. A small step towards
making those greedy brothers behave better, but perhaps an important one.