The recent incident involving the alleged imposition of “male guardianship” on three adult women at Dhaka’s international airport is deeply troubling.
The three friends were barred from boarding a flight to Kathmandu for a holiday after immigration officials subjected them to intrusive questioning, moral policing, and harassment.
All three had valid passports, visas, and airline tickets, with no known legal or travel restrictions. Yet, immigration officers stopped them at the checkpoint, interrogated them about their personal lives, and ultimately prevented them from travelling.
What kind of archaic moral policing are we practicing to curtail young women’s freedom of movement in the 21st century?
Fortunately, the incident did not go unchallenged. Forced to miss their scheduled flight, the women refused to let the matter rest and are now pursuing legal action.
This kind of social intrusion and incivility brings to mind a short story I read during my school years in the 1970s.
Written in the early 1940s by Ismat Chughtai, one of the subcontinent’s finest Urdu storytellers, the story is titled Ek Shauhar Ki Khatir (All for a Husband). Although written nearly a century ago, its plot bears an unsettling resemblance to the recent incident at Dhaka airport, highlighting how little our society has changed.
Chughtai’s story revolves around a young, educated, unmarried woman who decides to travel alone by train across British India. Despite warnings from friends and relatives that travelling unescorted is dangerous and socially unacceptable, she sets off on her journey.
En route from Jodhpur to Bombay, she encounters passengers from different walks of life who are deeply unsettled by her decision to travel alone. Her fellow passengers, particularly the traditionally-minded women in the carriage, display palpable patriarchal anxiety over her safety, mobility, and lack of a male protector.
Initially, the train compartment was relatively empty. But as more passengers board, her peaceful journey turns into a battle of intrusive questions.
Her fellow travellers immediately begin probing into her personal life: Where is she going -- to her parents’ home or her husband’s? Where is her husband? Why is she travelling alone? When she casually reveals that she is unmarried and is not going to her parents’ home, their suspicion gives way to pity and horror. To the traditional women in the carriage, an unmarried woman of her age travelling alone is a social anomaly that must somehow be corrected.
To escape their scrutiny and navigate their absurd social expectations, the protagonist decides to play along, claiming that she is married. But the interrogation continues.
Her fellow passengers then demand to know how many children she has. Matching the absurdity of their worldview with equally absurd fabrications, she begins spinning increasingly implausible tales.
When one passenger calculates the timeline and questions how she could have had eight children in just four years of marriage, the protagonist retorts that it is entirely possible to have triplets or quadruplets at a time.
Through the seemingly ordinary setting of a moving train compartment, Chughtai brilliantly satirizes society’s attempts to force independent women into rigid domestic roles. The story draws a timeless parallel with the physical and institutional checkpoints women continue to face today.
Nearly a century later, young, unmarried women in our part of the world continue to face the same patriarchal surveillance, restrictions and moral policing.
Consider an incident in May 2013, when a case at Mumbai’s international airport in India attracted widespread public attention. A 21-year-old female student planning to backpack alone across Europe was subjected to an aggressive and intrusive interrogation by an immigration officer who demanded to know why she was travelling alone.
Crossing all professional boundaries, the officer reportedly said that if her parents allowed her to backpack alone, her family background was “questionable.” He also warned her not to “go crying to the embassy” if anything went wrong.
The ensuing public outcry prompted the Bureau of Immigration to remove the officer from frontline duties permanently and introduce mandatory gender-sensitization workshops at major Indian airports.
Yet, here we are in late 2026, witnessing similar allegations of institutional overreach at Dhaka airport. The officers reportedly questioned why the three women were unmarried, why they were travelling without a male guardian, and whether their families had given them “permission” to travel.
They allegedly went so far as to call one woman’s father and subject him to a humiliating conversation. When challenged, the officials reportedly failed to provide any legal explanation or written justification for stopping the women, effectively derailing their trip.
It is heartening that the travellers refused to remain silent. After their initial administrative complaints went unanswered, they filed a writ petition. In late September 2026, a High Court bench issued a rule questioning the legality of the immigration officials’ actions and asking the home secretary and immigration authorities to explain why preventing adult women from travelling on the basis of their marital or guardianship status should not be declared illegal.
Some officials have informally sought to justify such intrusive questioning by citing the risk of human trafficking through air travel. But can egregious moral policing be excused in the name of anti-trafficking measures? Absolutely not.
Anti-trafficking protocols must never be weaponized to justify gender-based discrimination. A legitimate security mandate does not give officials licence to make offensive remarks about women passengers’ attire, scrutinize their personal finances without proper grounds, or change their professional conduct based solely on a passenger’s marital status.
In Ek Shauhar Ki Khatir, the moment the protagonist assumes the socially sanctioned identity of a “wife,” she is suddenly considered safe and acceptable. The episode exposes just how superficial and arbitrary these social boundaries are.
Nearly a century later, we must ask our state institutions: Do officials manning our international borders really expect unmarried women travelling alone to lie about their marital status and invent male guardians simply to clear immigration?
Unless we dismantle this institutionalized moral policing, our state apparatus will remain little different from the regressive, gossiping train compartment of the 1940s: Frozen in time, hostile to progress, and profoundly threatened by the sight of an independent woman.
Reaz Ahmad is Editor, Dhaka Tribune.