Global Watch | No respite for women in Pakistan from their ‘Feudal Lords’

The ongoing tussle between the army and Tehreek-e-Insaf has taken an ugly turn, with the latter’s leader Imran Khan alleging that thousands of women workers from his party have been picked up by the establishment and they are being raped, tortured and kept in inhumane conditions. This also brings back the focus on the status of women political workers in Pakistan’s polity. It couldn’t have been more ironical that the issue of mistreatment and harassment of women political workers has come back to the fore when the first lady of Pakistan is known for having suffered a great deal. Tehmina Durrani, wife of Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, came to be known as a strong feminist voice after she wrote an explosive first-hand account of exposing the rottenness of Pakistani society and polity especially in the context of women. Durrani’s My Feudal Lord shocked the outside world as she gave first-hand account of how she suffered at the hands of Pakistani politician Ghulam Mustafa Khar. Durrani was the sixth wife of Khar and while she was married to him, he was sleeping with her younger sister who was 13 years old.  Durrani explained that she wrote this book to give an insight into the socio-economic disorder in Pakistan. “Mustafa Khar and other feudal lords thrive and multiply on silence. Muslim women must learn to raise their voices against injustice. For me, conventional politics was no longer the answer. In Pakistan, the system is merely used to hoodwink further those who are already exploited. I realized that I could do no greater service for my country and our people than to expose the camouflage,” wrote Durrani. Rafia Zakaria explains quite aptly the feudal mindset of Pakistani society and establishment, especially when it comes to dealing with women activists, through her book, The Upstairs Wife: An intimate History of Pakistan. She recounts an incident that happened on 16 November, 1988, that tells you how women are treated in Pakistan’s polity if they try to raise any issue. On 16 November, 1988, a young college girl, Bushra Zaidi, was run over by a bus. Three of her friends were badly injured. The bus was driven by a Pashtun and the police refused to take any action against the driver. According to Zakaria, “All indications were that this event would be quickly forgotten. At least an hour after the accident the incident was revealed to be different.” “…(But) a new generation of girls had been brought up behind the walls of that educational facility, unprivileged girls raised just like Bushra Zaidi inside the tight limits of airless rooms and insecure respectability, Karachi girls who had believed in college and education, and stared down and dodged the very buses that had killed their classmate. When these girls heard that no police report had been filed and no charges lodged against the driver for killing Bushra Zaidi, they grew agitated. Wet with tears and reddened with anger, they congregated in clusters around the cheap, painted desks, holding textbooks of anatomy and geography and Urdu literature, sweating and crying under the slow-moving fans.” “Their anguish and frustration swelled when their teachers tried to force them to sit down and fix their gaze once again at the blackboards covered with equations. They refused. When they were pushed out of the classrooms, they collected in the corridors; when they were pushed out of the corridors, they came outside. Hours after Bushra Zaidi died on the street outside Sir Syed Girls College, the girls came out into the heat, into the hordes of men that still waited at the gates, into the blood puddles that marked the spot where their friends were hit. The police who had surrounded the college after the incident, the police who were refusing to register a report against the driver, now panicked. They had never before seen girls emerge into a street, young girls, college girls shouting slogans. The crowd of girls grew as more and more emerged from the buildings. A few hours after Bushra Zaidi’s death, in the scorching late afternoon heat of a Karachi April, the street was full of angry, young girls. Slowly, the demonstration inched toward a police van parked outside the gate, their every step forward marked with their collective chant for justice for the dead Bushra. The policemen in the van were outnumbered.” Zakaria shares the harrowing details of how it ended for these college girls. “Rather than standing by, allowing the wispy, unarmed girls, they charged at them with the police van. It was mayhem. One girl at the front of the line folded to the ground in the first frontal assault of the van. Then the policemen in their black and khaki uniforms stormed the crowd of chanting girls and began to beat them with batons. These were untouched girls who never spoke to strange men, girls who were permitted to leave their homes only to get an education, girls who asked shopkeepers to place objects on counters to avoid even the barest brush of a male hand, girls who had never protested.” “The policemen didn’t care. They grabbed and groped the girls, their breasts, faces, and hair, intent on teaching them a lesson. They were being taught not to leave the boundaries of their campus, not to ask for something the men did not want to give them; they were being taught the consequences for speaking up. Other police vans arrived, with more men and more batons and more guns and more anger. Crumpled by their numbers and their guns, the weeping, beaten girls retreated inside the college walls and the terrified college administration shut the gates to hold back the swarm of armed police.” But this still didn’t end. “The military assault on the girls continued. Shells were lobbed over the college walls, streaming tear gas through the open windows of the buildings and leaving hundreds of girls crouched on the ground, coughing, sputtering, and crying. After the killing of Bushra Zaidi, Karachi erupted.” Zaidi was a Muhajir. There were clashes between Pashtuns and Muhajirs. Zakaria says, “In the days that followed, hundreds died, and from their blood a fifth ethnicity emerged in Pakistan. There were no longer Sindhis, Punjabis, Balochis, and Pashtuns, each neatly attached to a province in a country that then had four of them. This new ethnicity was called ‘Muhajir’, or ‘refugee’, an umbrella name for all those whose families migrated to Pakistan post-1947, all those who now lived in a Karachi straining at its seams. Justice for Bushra Zaidi’s death did not come until almost two years later, and it was a justice erected on the shoulders of ethnicity, of who belonged where.” Benazir Bhutto won the general elections but she had lost Karachi that was swept by the Muhajir Qaumi Movement (a political movement to obtain equal rights for Muhajirs, migrants from India). However, MQM was later crushed by the Pakistani army. In fact, women activists in several other parts of Pakistan such as Balochistan and Sindh have been suffering at the hands of the Pakistani army and establishment for more than seven decades. The same had happened earlier to Eastern Pakistan also where women were specifically targeted by Pakistan’s Punjabi generals and politicians. History is repeating itself but with a little twist as this time it is not the Baloch, Sindhi or women from NWFP or POJK which are being targeted, it is Punjabi women activists who are being targeted by the Pakistani army. And all that is happening with the backing of Shehbaz Sharif. This is truly the latest generation of Pakistani feudal lords! The writer, author and columnist, has written several books. He tweets @ArunAnandLive. Views expressed are personal. Read all the Latest News , Trending News , Cricket News , Bollywood News , India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook , Twitter and Instagram .