Afghan women got the right to vote in 1919, 106 years ago today. Exactly one year later, girls started going to school. In 1970, the marriage age for girls was raised from 18 to 21, education was made compulsory, and polygamy was banned by law. At that time, boys and girls could study in the same classroom at Kabul University! However, a year after Afghanistan, American women got the opportunity to vote for the first time! French women had to wait another 25 years (1944) for the same opportunity, and Indian women got the opportunity to vote for the first time after independence in 1950.
A hundred years later, where are American girls now? French girls are enjoying all the benefits of being citizens of a modern country; Indian girls are also moving forward!
However, in the name of religion, after imposing Sharia, how are Afghan girls doing? Let's see!
In 1980, after the Mujahideen or Taliban forces won the war with the Soviet Union, they were the first to impose various restrictions on women! Although those restrictions were relaxed for 20 years after the American occupation in 2001, Afghanistan fell under the Taliban again in 2021!
In Afghanistan, there was a law called the Law on the Elimination of Violence against Women to report any kind of oppression against women and children. There were safe houses to protect the oppressed. The Taliban government first abolished these two.
In December 2022, the Taliban government issued a decree banning girls from studying after the sixth grade. At the moment, Afghanistan is the only country in the world where secondary and higher education for girls is completely prohibited.
First, the girls who were working were removed from government jobs, and the rest were first asked to work from home! Those who went to work were forced to take a mahram (male guardian) with them!
Then, the poor families who lost their jobs were left on the streets. The poor started getting poorer; the situation of single mothers in particular was the most miserable.
The number of beggars on the streets of Afghanistan has increased at an alarming rate. The youth were not even educated. Unemployment continued to rise, and those youths started fleeing the country by crossing water and jungles to save their lives.
Just think of our garment sector. In the garment sector, which accounts for 84 percent of export earnings, 60 percent of the workers are women! If these workers are suddenly laid off, won't their families suffer a terrible loss? Won't Bangladesh's economy come to a standstill? The same situation will happen if women are not allowed to work in agriculture.
Before the Taliban took power in 2021, 27% of the parliament were female MPs, and 21% of all branches of the security forces were women. Out of about 2,000 judges, there were 265 female judges! Three years later, there is not even a single woman in the above three fields. Zero....
In a country where boys and girls used to study at equal rates in medical colleges, now 1 Afghan woman dies every two hours while giving birth. The reason for this is the ban on women being treated by male doctors and the use of all types of birth control methods. On the contrary, the number of female health workers has decreased due to the ban on girls' education.
In the earthquake that happened a few days ago, women and teenagers were not rescued from the rubble, because there were no men close to the women who were trapped (because the men had already fled to save their lives).
How a modern country in this world was destroyed by Sharia law, how 50 percent of the people of a country lost their human rights just for being women, the most recent example is Afghanistan!
If men work 8 hours in the same workplace and women work 5 hours, what will happen? Why would a private organization, whose main job is to make a profit, hire workers who have to pay the same or more than men for less work? The Jamaat has its own hundreds of organizations, look into it and see how many women work there? Even if you find two or four people at the lowest level, ask them how many hours they work.
Basically, what will happen is that women will be expelled from government institutions, and the recruitment of women workers in the private sector will stop. If they cannot get jobs, if they can make doctors and engineers, what is the benefit of educating girls? As a result, girls' education will also stop! If they cannot stop it directly, this will be their strategy.
This strategy has already started.
In May this year, UN Women and Citizen Platform said in their report titled 'State of the Economy of Bangladesh from a Gender Perspective' that in the first half of the last fiscal year (July-December), about 2.1 million people lost their jobs, of which about 1.8 million were women, which is 85 percent of the total number of people who lost their jobs. Currently, only 19 percent of women are active in the labor market, which is the lowest in the last few years.
Women are losing jobs in various sectors, including banks! They are being forced to wear a hijab at work. Those who do not wear hijab are being indirectly harassed in various ways! They are being called and scolded unnecessarily. We are seeing what kind of problems women who go out on the streets are facing! If these seem like isolated incidents, you can talk to any working woman and see for yourself.
As a result, what we have seen so far is a trailer. The main movie will start, if Jamaat can come to power, then! A little hint of what the story of the movie will be like was heard in the speech of the Ameer of Jamaat today!
So, those of you who are dreaming of seeing Jamaat in power, those university girls who are overflowing with joy and voting for Shibir, know that if Jamaat can come to power with your vote, you will be the last woman from your family to go to university.
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