Ordinance provided some safeguards for women in
the area of divorce law, but the 1962 constitution
removed rights to directly vote women into
reserved seats. The 1973 constitution under elected
leader Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto included equality before
the law, non-discrimination on the basis of sex in
government service, and reserved legislative seats
for women at the local and national levels (Ali
2000).
After ousting Bhutto, military ruler Zia ul-Haq
appealed to religious parties and patriarchal inter-
pretations of Islam to consolidate his power.
Women were central to General Zia’s “Islamiza-
tion” program, including the Hudood Ordinances
passed in 1979, which made women pursuing rape
cases vulnerable to charges of adultery. The oppo-
sition of women’s organizations such as the
Women’s Action Forum (WAF) was able to restrict
to the realm of finance another law reducing the
value of women’s testimony to half that of men’s
(Weiss 1994, 418).
Since his death in 1988, General Zia’s “Islamic”
amendments to the 1973 constitution have per-
sisted, although various governments have ap-
pointed female judges, put in place women’s quotas
for government employment, and in 1996 agreed
to become party to the UN Convention on the
Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against
Women (CEDAW). Even the first female prime
minister of a Muslim state, Benazir Bhutto, daugh-
ter of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and initially opposed to
the Hudood Ordinances, found it politically unten-
able to repeal them once in office. The eighth
amendment, passed under Zia, contributed to her
difficulty by necessitating a two-thirds vote in the
National Assembly to repeal the laws that had been
passed by Zia’s government. Returning Pakistan to
military rule in 1999, Pervez Musharraf has criti-
cized reactionary Islamists yet also further under-
mined judicial independence (Cotran and Yamani
2000, 162–3). The imperative to focus on legal
rights has meant that the women’s movement
in Pakistan has had limited ability to focus on
broader social and economic development issues
(Ali 2000).
bangladesh
After the creation of Bangladesh (formerly East
Pakistan) in 1971, a secular constitution was put in
place in 1972. Interrupted by extended periods of
military rule, democracy re-emerged with the 1991
elections. Despite efforts to achieve gender equality
in the constitution and the dominance of two
female leaders in contemporary Bangladesh, Begum
Khaleda Zia, leader of the Bangladesh Nationalist
south asia 83Party (BNP) and Sheikh Hasina, leader of the
Awami League (AL), the political influence of most
women in Bangladesh remains low.
The constitution reserved 15 seats for women in
the parliament, a number raised to 30 (nearly 10
percent of total seats) in 1979. After a lapse of three
years starting in 1987, a 1990 constitutional amend-
ment reinstated the 30 reserved seats. Women have
successfully contested non-reserved seats as well.
Politicians who have benefited from these reserva-
tions have mixed feelings about the ability of such
policies to empower women (Commonwealth Sec-
retariat 1999, 27–37).
The constitution guarantees women’s equality in
public life but not in the personal sphere, which is
governed by the personal laws of religious commu-
nities. Muslim personal laws in Bangladesh, appli-
cable in cases of marriage, divorce, inheritance, and
child custody, discriminate against women, despite
reforms in 1961. Men’s rights to polygamy, easier
divorce, larger inheritance of property, and author-
ity over children after divorce are examples of
inequities in personal laws (Khan 2001, Akhtar
2001).
Special ordinances against gender-based violence
originated in 1983 and were expanded to include
children in the 1990s. The government of Bangla-
desh is also a signatory of CEDAW, yet enforcement
of these domestic, constitutional, and international
initiatives remains limited by corruption and weak
enforcement mechanisms. As in the rest of South
Asia, many women, particularly poor women, are
not aware of their rights (Asian Development Bank
2001, 6).india
Unlike Pakistan and Bangladesh, India is not a
Muslim-majority state, but its 12 percent Muslim
population makes it one of the largest Muslim
countries in the world. India’s constitution, in place
from 1950 to the present, declares it a secular
republic, committed to equality. Personal laws
varying by religious community (applicable in cases
involving marriage, divorce, maintenance, guar-
dianship, adoption, inheritance, and succession)
are one mechanism to achieve religious minority
rights, yet they have raised questions about both
secularism and equity, particularly with regard to
women’s rights (Larson 2001).
Debates over whether India should have a uni-
form civil code came to the forefront of Indian pol-
itics with the Supreme Court case of Shah Bano, a
divorced Muslim woman demanding maintenance.
The Supreme Court circumvented Muslim personal
law to grant Shah Bano ongoing maintenance in