EIGHTEEN months after the July uprising, Bangladesh entered 2026 with a national election. The intervening period was marked by the tenure of an interim government, formed in the uprising’s aftermath and officially tasked with stabilising the state, undertaking necessary reforms, and overseeing a credible electoral process. Positioned between rupture and restoration, this arrangement was expected to function as a neutral bridge, holding institutions in place until electoral legitimacy could be re-established.
Yet this was also a moment of intense political realignment — one in which the boundaries between state power, political legitimacy, and media authority were being redrawn. Within this shifting terrain, incidents in which women journalists were prevented from covering political events — particularly those organised by Islamist groups — formed a pattern that demands structural explanation. It is within this context that the Media Reform Commission’s gender recommendations require critical scrutiny. Before turning to that scrutiny, however, it is necessary to acknowledge the conditions under which the Commission worked. The interim period was marked by the consolidation of Islamist influence, rapid shifts in media ownership, and an uneven — at times openly ambivalent — commitment on the part of the interim government to women’s rights. That the Commission produced recommendations at all within these conditions warrants acknowledgment. But acknowledgment cannot substitute for analysis. If anything, it is precisely because the Commission operated under such constrained conditions that its framework needed to go further than it did.
The Media Reform Commission’s gender recommendations are organised around a set of recognisable institutional priorities: removing discrimination in recruitment, preparing gender-sensitive codes of conduct, providing separate toilets and childcare facilities, ensuring safe transport, establishing grievance redressal cells, protecting maternity leave, and developing guidelines on how women should be portrayed. These are reasonable institutional steps. Read against the political conditions of the interim period, however, they reveal the limits of their assumptions.
Critical feminist theorist Nancy Fraser’s distinction between affirmative and transformative remedies is instructive here. Affirmative remedies, Fraser (1997) argues, correct inequitable outcomes without disturbing the underlying structures that generate them — they redistribute access and protection while leaving the architecture of power intact. Transformative remedies, by contrast, seek to reconfigure those structures themselves. The Commission’s recommendations are affirmative in precisely this sense. They ask media organisations to treat women better. However, they still do not ask who owns those organisations, under what political conditions ownership shifted after August 2024, or whether women’s access to editorial authority is contingent on political alignment rather than professional standing. A harassment policy within a newsroom that has itself been politically restructured is not a gender intervention. It is, at best, an administrative gesture toward one.
Fraser’s framework exposes a fundamental category error in that the report treats gender as a variable to be corrected within a stable institutional framework, at precisely the moment when that framework was undergoing profound transformation. Procedural reforms cannot address a reconfiguration of power that the report does not name. The limitations of this framework become most visible not in what the Commission recommends, but in what it cannot see.
In January 2025, a journalist from UNB was denied entry to an event organised by an Islamist group where the interim government’s Religion Adviser was present as the chief guest, explicitly on the grounds of her gender. This incident — widely reported, insufficiently analysed — is precisely the kind of event the Commission’s framework cannot account for. To read it as a safety failure or an access gap is already to misread it.
Michel Foucault argues that every discursive order defines not only what can be said, but who can speak, from where, and under what conditions their speech will register as legitimate (Foucault, 1972). The exclusion of women journalists from politically sanctioned spaces during the interim period was not a logistical problem. It was an act of discursive ordering — a statement about what kinds of bodies are appropriate in political and religious spaces, and what forms of presence the reconstituted public sphere would permit. The question is not simply who gets to speak, but who is recognised as a legitimate witness to public life. That recognition is always already a political question.
From this perspective, the Commission’s emphasis on safety measures — transport, security protocols, institutional support — addresses only the surface. Physical safety matters, but when women are positioned as out of place within the state’s own normative framework, safety becomes secondary rather than foundational. The concern here is not protection alone, but the discursive and institutional conditions under which women come to be recognised as political subjects at all. The Commission offers women protection within a public sphere whose terms of entry it does not question.
The Commission’s gender recommendations are written in a language familiar to anyone acquainted with international development discourse on women in media. Anthropologist Saba Mahmood’s critique of liberal feminist frameworks helps explain why that familiarity is itself a problem. Mahmood (2005) argues that liberal frameworks tend to equate agency with resistance, interpret constraint as victimhood, and treat institutional inclusion as empowerment. The Commission’s recommendations reproduce this approach precisely: gender is framed as a problem of access and protection, abstracted from the political conditions actively shaping that exclusion.
This produces two critical blind spots. First, the framework cannot account for women whose professional and political identities do not conform to the secular-liberal subject it implicitly addresses — women who work within religious institutions, who cover non-secular political formations, or whose exclusion operates through mechanisms the language of inclusion cannot name. Second, and more consequentially, it cannot address exclusion that is being produced by the political transition itself. While the Commission recommends bringing women into newsrooms, it has no framework for what happens when the conditions of that transition are simultaneously pushing them out of visibility, credibility, and influence.
Media ownership is not a neutral economic arrangement. It is a site where the conditions of legitimate speech are determined — where decisions are made about whose voices are amplified, which narratives are credible, and who has the authority to tell the story of a transition. During the interim period, ownership transfers and editorial realignments followed patterns that the Commission’s report does not examine or name.
This silence is itself significant. A gender analysis that does not ask who owns the media cannot ask whose interests shape editorial decisions, which stories get commissioned, or which journalists are retained when political winds shift. When access to editorial authority becomes contingent on political alignment rather than professional standing, numerical increases in women’s representation lose their meaning as indicators of gender justice.
A reform agenda limited to inclusion, safety, and representation risks stabilising the very structures it claims to address. Without interrogating the political conditions under which exclusion is produced, reform discourse functions as legitimation rather than transformation — it gives the appearance of change while leaving the underlying architecture of power intact.
The Media Reform Commission’s gender recommendations represent a genuine institutional effort produced under quite difficult conditions. But the very conditions that made reform difficult are precisely those the report fails to analyse — the reorganisation of media ownership, the contested terms of women’s presence in public life, and the state’s uneven commitment to the rights it was nominally charged with protecting. A framework borrowed from international development discourse cannot account for a political transition that was actively reshaping the ground on which that framework stood. Gender justice in media requires not better policies within existing structures, but a reckoning with the structures themselves.
Tina Nandi is an educator, researcher and translator.
