Five Decades, One Ideology: From the 1971 Mass Rapes to the 2026 Anti-Women Bills

Research Report  ·  Futura Genesis Center  ·  July 2026

Two Dates, One Party

In 1971, an East Pakistan political party organised paramilitary units that used the mass rape of Bengali women as an instrument of war. In 2026, the same party is contesting a national election on a platform that would limit how many hours a woman may work outside her home. Fifty-five years separate these two facts. The party does not.

Jamaat-e-Islami's East Pakistan branch formed the Al-Badr and Al-Shams paramilitaries jointly with Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence in 1971. Bangladesh's International Crimes Tribunal later convicted five Jamaat leaders for war crimes committed through those units — crimes that included the organised rape of Bengali women alongside the murder of civilians and the targeted killing of the country's intellectual class. In 2023, Jamaat's sitting chief described women's education and paid work outside the home as "another form of prostitution." In the same period, the party put forward a parliamentary proposal to cap women's formal-sector working hours at five per day, paired with a government wage subsidy to offset the lost income. This is not a coincidence of timing. It is the visible surface of a single, consistent position: women belong under male authority, without independent economic or political power, and any Jamaat-led order — militarised or electoral — will be organised to enforce that.

1971: Controlling Women's Bodies as a Weapon of War

The record of the International Crimes Tribunal of Bangladesh (ICT-BD) documents that Jamaat-e-Islami's paramilitary wings did not commit sexual violence as an incidental byproduct of war. It was organised, and it was directed by named individuals who held formal positions within the party.

Abdul Quader Mollah — known in the Tribunal's findings and in Bangladeshi public memory as "the Butcher of Mirpur" — was executed in 2013 after conviction for war crimes that included the murder of 344 civilians. Motiur Rahman Nizami, who rose to become Jamaat's own party chief in the postwar decades, was executed in 2016 after conviction on charges that explicitly included genocide, rape, and torture. These were not junior collaborators operating at the margins of the organisation. Nizami led the party. Five Jamaat leaders in total were convicted by the ICT-BD for crimes committed in 1971 through Al-Badr and Al-Shams — the paramilitaries the party had formed jointly with the Pakistani military's intelligence service specifically to suppress the Bengali liberation movement.

The use of rape in 1971 was not simply violence against individual women. It was, as documented in the Tribunal record, a mechanism of control — a way of terrorising a population into submission by attacking the bodies of its women. The logic embedded in that mechanism was explicit: women's bodies were treated as instruments through which a population could be dominated, rather than as belonging to the women themselves.

2023–2024: The Same Logic, Peacetime Form

More than fifty years later, Jamaat-e-Islami's public political platform expresses a related premise through different instruments. In 2023, party chief Shafiqur Rahman characterised women's participation in education and public-facing work as "another form of prostitution" — reporting on the remark was carried by outlets including NDTV and The Diplomat. In 2023–24, the party advanced a parliamentary proposal that would cap women's working hours in the formal economy at five per day, with a state subsidy intended to make the reduced income tolerable — reported by Asia Times and the International Crisis Group.

Where 1971 used organised violence to remove women from public life by force, the 2023–24 platform proposes to remove women from full economic participation by statute. The instrument has changed from paramilitary to parliamentary. The premise — that women's presence in public, economic, and educational life is itself a problem to be managed or restricted — has not.

This is the connection this piece is built to make, and it is important to state precisely what is, and is not, being claimed. This is not an assertion that the individuals who committed the 1971 atrocities are the same people advancing the 2023–24 proposals; Mollah and Nizami are dead. It is an assertion, grounded in the documented record, of ideological continuity within a single organisation — the same party, across five decades, treating women's subordination to male authority as an organising principle to be enforced through whatever instrument the moment allows.

2024–2026: Rehabilitation Through Revolution

Jamaat-e-Islami did not remain at the margins of Bangladeshi politics after 1971. It was politically active for decades, and in 2024 it participated in the coalition that overthrew Sheikh Hasina's government in the July Revolution. In the aftermath, the party has positioned itself for the February 2026 elections, nominating candidates nationwide while presenting itself publicly as a "moderate" political force.

The record makes that framing difficult to accept uncritically. A party whose own past chief was executed for genocide and rape, and whose current chief has called women's public work a form of prostitution, is not moderating its position on women — it is adjusting its vocabulary while its 2023–24 legislative proposals remain on record. The core position — that women's economic and civic participation should be curtailed under male-defined limits — is continuous with the position enforced through Al-Badr and Al-Shams in 1971. What has changed is only the permissible means of enforcing it.

The Conclusion the Record Supports

The claim this piece makes is narrow and precise, because the record supports nothing broader: Jamaat-e-Islami is a single organisation whose leadership, across fifty-five years, has treated the control of women — their bodies in 1971, their labour and public presence in 2023–2026 — as central to its political project. The instruments have ranged from paramilitary rape to parliamentary bills. The ideology connecting them has not changed. A party seeking legitimacy in 2026 on the strength of a "moderate" label carries a documented history, verified by an international-standard tribunal, that its own recent political platform does nothing to contradict.

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