Giving women a voice

For a Pakistani resident at a place a long way from the country - in my case the United States - every visit to the homeland brings forth some new and unexpected revelation. What I observe during my frequent visits to the country may not have entered the full consciousness of the citizenry.

This is not because I lay claim to some exceptional sense of observation not found among ordinary residents of the country. What I may be able to see with some acuteness compared to those who live here is simply because I am not a constant part of the local milieu.

Change is always hard to discern by those who are part of the environment in which it is occurring. After all, earthlings are not conscious of the fact that the planet on which they live is in constant motion.

Change is always more perceptible to those who are not embedded within the situation that affects it. The transformation of the Pakistani society I began to notice during this recent visit to Pakistan could have enormous implications for the country's future. My particular worry at this time concerns what Pakistani women are doing to themselves.

A large number of them, having received instruction from religious institutions that are pursuing highly conservative objectives, are deliberately withdrawing from active participation in economic, social and political activities.

They are being taught that their salvation lies not in putting their shoulders to the wheel in order to improve their well-being and that of their families. They have, instead, to commit their lives to understanding and following the word of God and that of his Prophet (PBUH) as interpreted for them.

There are two unfortunate aspects to this development. This movement - it is nothing less than that since it is being pursued with enormous energy and the commitment of a large amount of financial resources - is affecting the segment of the society that is supposed to lead the country towards modernity and economic development.

The second problem with this development is that for centuries women have been pushed into an inferior situation by men. This time if women stay in the background, condemned to an inferior status in society, a large part of the blame will have to be assigned to them. There is, however, one sliver of a silver lining that is becoming visible, something I will mention in the concluding part of this article.

It is now common for development economists to assert that for economic modernization to occur, women's view of life must first change. They must modernize not in the sense that word is sometimes interpreted by religious conservatives. Modernization from the perspective of development economics does not mean casting off one form of dress for another.

It does not mean listening to music, or going to the movies, or getting photographed. It does not even imply attending coeducational institutions rather than those that separate boys from girls. Modernization means changing the way individuals look at the world - to move towards rational thought and away from the line of thinking embedded in obscurantist ways.

Islamic radicals are busy persuading their followers that the West has lost its way and left the path laid out by God in the various scriptures revealed by Him to his Messengers. For those who are more rational in the way they look at world history it is hard to deny that industrial countries have progressed way beyond what has been achieved by the world of Islam.

We don't have to go much deeper than look at the copious amount of data and information provided by the annual editions of the UNDP's Human Development Report to note how far Muslim countries have fallen behind in terms of providing their citizens with a good quality of life.

The UNDP has a modest definition of human development: literacy rates, life expectancy and income per head of the population. After reviewing these simple statistics it is hard to accept the view that the West has gone astray.

It is unfortunately the teachings of those who believe in a version of Islam not found in the Holy Book that is leading astray Muslim societies. Nowhere is this more significant than the way some parts of the Muslim world are defining the role of women in society.

When Islam came to the Indian subcontinent via both Arabia and Central Asia, one thing that it brought to that vast place was respect for women. One of the ways that distinguished Hinduism from Islam is the way the latter treated women. Muslims viewed with abhorrence "sutti" - the gruesome practice of killing widows on the burning pyres of their deceased husbands - in most of Hindu India.

Even those who did not participate in this rite condemned widows to an inferior status for the rest of their existence by forcing them to withdraw from life. Islam, on the other hand, not only permitted widows to remarry, but encouraged them to do so.

Although sutti was banned by the British, the Indians continued to discriminate against women. A recent chronicler of India despaired at the way modern India continued to treat its women. India: Facing the Twenty-First Century, a book published some ten years ago by the journalist Barbara Crosette, painted a grim picture of women's situation in the country.

The author worried that "most women in India cannot read; a few have control of the size of their families. The majority of Indian girls are denied choices in careers or marriage partners. Women, as well as men, are further restricted by the persistent stranglehold of caste.

Girls are hemmed in by social or religious traditions that inhibit their freedom and personal growth. The attitude towards women cannot be separated from larger discussions now going on in India about how to winnow out of a rich heritage those mindsets and instincts out of step with twenty-first century thinking while saving the core of an important cultural and spiritual legacy."

Much has improved in India since these words were written. Women have decided to take the lead in forcing society to bring about a change in their situation. A number of them have gained international recognition by espousing not only women's causes but focusing on a number of other issues that should be of concern to all developing societies.

A good example of this kind of leadership is that provided by the world-acclaimed novelist, Arunadhati Roy, the author of the award-winning novel, The God of Small Things. A large number of Pakistani women who could play similar roles have chosen instead to withdraw into religion. It would be hard to argue that such behaviour conforms to the will of God Who wants His creation to strive to improve their condition.

By no stretch of imagination can I claim to be a scholar of Islam. However, what I have read about major world religions tells me that Islam was the first faith of significance to bring women out of extreme backwardness into a near equal status with men. Fourteen centuries later, an obscurantist brand of Islam is being increasingly associated with pulling women back into extreme backwardness.

The images left in many minds by the short-lived Taliban regime in Afghanistan is that of denial of most basic rights to women. A picture that gets viewed repeatedly on the television of the West is of an Afghan woman in a burqa being shot in the head in a public place for having allegedly engaged in adulterous behaviour. This was not the society that the Prophet of Islam wanted to create for those who chose to follow the Word of God.

That the women of Pakistan have a long way to go before they can close the gap that exists between them and men have been very ably demonstrated by a team of social scientists headed by Akmal Hussain in their recent study for the UNDP. In Pakistan: National Human Development Report, 2003, Hussain and associates provide a wealth of rich but depressing information on how far behind Pakistani women have fallen. I will use a few of the report's statistics to illustrate this point.

Female literacy is only 29 per cent compared to 55 per cent for men. Only 47 per cent of girls are immunized against childhood diseases compared to 52 per cent of boys.

Households of middle and lower income groups spend considerably less on women than on men. Women's participation in the labour market is adversely affected by restrictions on women's mobility and occupational segregation. Consequently, only 13.7 per cent of women participate in remunerative employment compared to 70.4 per cent men of working age.

The rate of participation is higher for lower income groups but declines significantly for families in higher income brackets. Even when women are paid for their labour, they earn much less than men doing comparable work. In intra household decisions related with children and food purchase, over 50 per cent of women report participation. However, when decisions are made about women's work outside the home, only 38.5 per cent have any say in them.

There cannot be any doubt that Pakistan will have to make a concerted effort to improve the lot of its women. A society that condemns its women to backwardness is choosing backwardness for itself.

To help women improve their social, economic and political situation they, along with other segments of society, will have to overcome three serious obstacles that now exist against their betterment. One of them has been around for a long time, not only in Pakistan but also in all societies: the belief that women are inferior to men.

It has taken the West a long time to overcome some of these deeply ingrained attitudes. Women in America had to fight long and hard before they were given the right to vote. Their struggle for complete equality continues; even in modern professions, women face what is called a "glass ceiling" - an invisible barrier - in making advances in their careers. The other two obstacles are peculiar to Pakistan and the Muslim world.

In the eighties, the administration of Ziaul Haq, by putting on statute books laws that discriminated against women, made it exceptionally hard for women to improve their situation. Among these was the Hudood Ordinance that prescribed severe punishments for offences that would be treated mildly, if at all, in civilized societies.

It is heartening that a group of women in the national legislature have begun a serious move to soften the impact of this ordinance, if not to repeal it altogether. The bill titled "The Protection and Empowerment of Women Bill" if passed would vindicate one of President Musharraf's strongly held beliefs.

He has argued that by increasing significantly the presence of women in the legislative assemblies his administration was providing an opportunity to this important segment of the population to fight for its legitimate rights. The position his administration takes on this bill will indicate whether that belief is being translated into practice.

The real obstacles to improving the lot of the Pakistani women will be the position they themselves take concerning their role in society. If they withdraw from society in accordance with certain interpretations of Islam, as some appear to be doing now, they will be doing themselves a lot of damage. Not only that, they will also be dealing a profound blow to progress and modernization in Pakistan.

Democracy on sufferance

The formation of a high profile National Security Council and, prior to that, the passage of the seventeenth constitutional amendment indicate that at best Pakistan is poised to have a controlled democracy.

Since direct democracy in which people themselves exercise sovereign power is impracticable in modern states owing to their large size, people elect their representatives and delegate them the sovereign power - the power to make laws and enforce them. This makes the parliament the supreme institution in parliamentary democracy. It is empowered to make, amend and repeal laws, both ordinary and constitutional.

Being a creation of parliament, the executive can be changed by it. Parliament itself is the creation of the electorate and is ultimately responsible to it. Making parliament subservient to any other institution runs counter to the very basis of parliamentary democracy.

Pakistan, however, is a land of contradictions, and the political system is no exception. There has long been the belief that democracy is ill suited to the country and that in case the introduction of democracy becomes necessary, the sampling of democracy should not be allowed to grow unhindered. The argument is that left to themselves, the people or their elected institutions are too ignorant to know and choose what is best for them. Therefore it is in their own interest that they are controlled by institutions intellectually and morally "superior" to them.

In the words of late president Iskandar Mirza, "Some underdeveloped countries have to learn democracy and until they do so they have to be controlled." These remarks reflect the #H4pmindset of the establishment when it comes to democracy.

They have never believed in the supremacy of democratic institutions and therefore never allowed them to take root. Instead, they have always sought to control them, and done so successfully. Some instances:

- The attempts to strengthen democracy were dealt the first severe blow when governor-general Ghulam Muhammad sacked prime minister Khawaja Nazimuddin who was enjoying the support of the majority in the legislature.

The dismissal broke with the fundamental convention of parliamentary system that it is the legislature which controls the executive, and established the unhealthy convention that the constitutional head (governor- general or president) can change the government. From then onward, the power to sack the prime minister was used by the president to weaken and control parliamentary institutions.

- Parliamentary institutions require that whenever a new prime minister is appointed, he should immediately seek a vote of trust from the majority of the members of the legislature. The purpose is to uphold the status of the parliament as the maker and sustainer of the executive. However, Ghulam Muhammad, who appointed Muhammad Ali as new prime minister after the dismissal of Nazimuddin, did not summon the legislature for five months. Again, the purpose was to make it clear that the new government owed its existence to the governor-general and not to parliament.

- The dismissal of the first Constituent Assembly in retaliation to its move to curtail the powers of the governor- general was a departure from another parliamentary convention that the parliament can be dissolved only on the advice of the prime minister. The dismissal made parliament, supposed to be the supreme institution, subservient to the constitutional head, which it has remained ever since. Only during the premiership of Z.A. Bhutto and the second tenure of Nawaz Sharif did parliament remain independent of the control of the president. Moreover, it was only on one occasion in the political history of Pakistan that it was dissolved on the advice of the prime minister. On all other occasions, it has been dismissed either by a powerful president or the army chief.

- The establishment has never been well disposed towards the idea of a powerful prime minister or parliament. What they want is a strong president and a docile prime minister. Therefore, they make sure that such constitutional provisions exist which empower the president to control both the prime minister and parliament. In the 1956 Constitution, one of the clauses empowered the president to sack the prime minister, which president Mirza invoked, or threatened to invoke, on several occasions to bring the prime minister to his heel.

The 1962 Constitution being presidential, there was no need for such a clause. The 1973 Constitution in its original form did not have any provision which could enable the president to control the prime minister or the legislature.

However, at the behest of late General Ziaul Article 58-2b was incorporated into the Constitution giving the president the discretionary power to dismiss the parliament and the prime minister. From its birth in 1985 to its repeal in 1997, the Article became a lethal weapon in the hands of successive presidents to control and destabilize parliamentary institutions.

General Musharraf, taking a leaf out of the book of his predecessor, got the Article 58-2b revived through the seventeenth constitutional amendment, and thus eliminated any possibility of the prime minister or the parliament getting out of his control.

Coming to the setting up of the National Security Council, the ruling party believes that the NSC will strengthen democracy. They had said similar things when the seventeenth amendment was enacted.

And views not different were expressed by the then ruling party when the eighth constitutional amendment was passed. We all know the role the eighth amendment played in destabilizing democratic institutions, and are apprehensive of a similar role of the seventeenth amendment.

As a matter of fact, democracy cannot be strengthened unless parliament is made its own master, subservient only to the popular will. As for the NSC, there is little reason to believe that it will strengthen democracy. Rather the legitimacy granted to the political role of the armed forces in NSC will belittle the stature of both the parliament and the prime minister and increase the control of the men in uniform over political institutions.

The children keep dying

"Sired by starvation, suckled by neglect/Hate was the surly tutor of my youth/I too can hiss the hair of men erect/Because my lips are venomous with truth." I read these lines of a minor poet and it could have been Malcolm Campbell, I am not sure but I was struck by them and remembered them.

And they now come to mind as I follow the proceedings of the Commission that is inquiring whether 9/11 could have been avoided, the great buck-passing game. No one is being asked why Osama bin Laden turned so virulently anti-American when he had been such a trusted friend. His family were business partners of some of the brightest and biggest corporations. Never mind that, the world has not merely moved on but spun out of control and Osama is being hunted down in the wilderness of Afghanistan and its mountain hide-outs.

Fast forward to Iraq and to Fallujah. CNN showed a clip of a four-year old Iraqi boy on a hospital bed, someone had tried to inject some cheer in the room for there was a smiling inflated doll hanging on his bed. His father sat by his side. The four-year old looked perplexed. Perhaps, too little to know that one of his arms had been amputated.

His father informed us that the boy had gone for a walk with his grandfather and they had been hit by what must be described by friendly-fire since the coalition forces do not target civilians unless they happen to be criminals and thugs and foreign fighters and remnants of the Saddam regime who are uncivilised and who scorn liberty.

The father told the CNN reporter that his son wanted to get up and move about but he could explain to him that he couldn't. The father hadn't slept for three days and nights, tending to his son, comforting him.

Almost immediately after this report, CNN took us to the White House where George Bush and Tony Blair appeared. George Bush spoke in staccato sound bites, liberty and democracy and staying the course. The faithful and obedient Blair added his agreements and his platitudes.

What great television it would have made if we had these two leaders speaking against the backdrop of the four-year old who had an arm shot-off on his hospital bed, gazing at the ceiling, with that far-away look that children sometimes get when they see tears streaming down the cheeks of one of their parents and cannot comprehend what the pain is about. CNN repeated the footage. I was angered when I saw it the first time. The second time I just wanted to throw up.

I do not buy into the argument that everything has changed after 9/11. This is an apology that moral cowards give. The value of a human life has not changed. Our sense of humanity has not numbed. In the light of a terrorist threat, a common enemy, should we not have become a kinder and more caring people.

I was flabbergasted by General John Abizaid speaking of the coalition's "judicious use of force." 600 to 700 Iraqis were killed in Fallujah over the past fortnight. The military commanders insist that they are only going after the 'insurgents' and one of them says, brazenly, in the circumstances, that his men are "trained to be precise in their firepower" and that " 95 per cent of those were legitimate targets."

Considering that the resistance has been dismissed, arrogantly, as being " thugs " and " criminals " that seems to be a lot of them and the Marines are deployed as if waging war with air cover and the works. If this is the "judicious use of force" then we must be grateful that there has been no injudicious use of force. What would that entail? Dropping a nuclear bomb?

If 95 per cent are legitimate targets, let us then look at the luckless 5 per cent who are dead or dying. Ronan Bennett writing in The Guardian does exactly that: "These include the mother of six-year-old Hiader Abdel Wahab, shot and killed while hanging out laundry, his father, shot in the head; Haider himself, and his brothers, crushed but dug out alive after a US missile struck their house. They include children who died of head wounds."

"They include an old woman with a bullet wound - still clutching a white flag when aid workers found her. They include an elderly man lying face down at the gate to his house - while inside terrified girls screamed "Baba! Baba!" They include ambulance crews fired on by US troops - and four-years-old Ali Nasser Fadil, wounded during an air strike.

The New York Times reporter who found the infant in a Baghdad hospital described him lying in bed, "his eyes wide and fixed on a spot in the ceiling." His left leg had been crudely amputated.

The same reporter found 10-year-old Waed Joda by the bedside of his gravely wounded father. "American snipers shot at us as we were trying to flee Fallujah,' said Waed."

The writer says that everyone of these incidents has been documented by journalists. Aid workers or medical staff. His final barrage: "Even allowing for casualties caused by the Iraqi resistance, the dread catalogue of American-inflicted suffering and death is long and undeniable.

At this point it's worth reminding ourselves that five per cent of 600 is 30. But the evidence of the bodies alone gives lie to the American account: at least 350 of the dead in Fallujah have been women and children."

The military action in Fallujah has been reprisal for the killing of four American contractors and the mutilation of their bodies. It was a barbaric act. There is no doubt of this in anyone's mind. But these were security guards. Time magazine has them as mercenaries or guns for hire. All the same one mourns their killing too. All human life is precious. The question arises: Are Iraqi lives of the same value or are Iraqis some lesser forms of life?