WOMEN activists had a field day on International Women’s Day last week lambasting the government for denying women their rights as guaranteed under the Constitution and religion. Ironically five days earlier, a controversial high court ruling on the Mukhtar Mai case had provided them added ammunition to criticize the authorities.

The timing could not have been more embarrassing for the ruling government, that is. Two days before the high court acquittal, the government had rejected a bill in the National Assembly which sought to strengthen the law against the practice of honour killing.

With this rejection of the amendment bill on ‘honour’ crimes, the government is being perceived by women activists as unwilling to plug the legal loopholes which exist for people who commit a whole range of honour-related crimes against women — from killing to jirga-approved criminal assault — to escape punishment.

On the other hand, the high court’s acquittal of those who were earlier found guilty by an anti-terrorism court in the Mukhtar Mai case and sentenced to death, is not only being perceived as tolerance of crimes committed in the name of honour but also as tolerance of crimes “dishonouring” women.

This has only served to strengthen the perception that the official resolve in dealing with crimes against women is considerably less than firm, notwithstanding the government’s statement that it would appeal against the high court decision in the Mukhtar Mai case, as well as the promise made by the president of the ruling PML to a delegation of the party’s women wing in Islamabad last week that the government would leave no stone unturned to punish the culprits in the Mukhtar Mai case, no matter how influential they were.

The perception of half-heartedness in dealing with crimes against women had already emerged last October when a government- moved bill against honour killing in the National Assembly was criticized for being a lacklustre and ineffective law.

The bill had provided for stiffer penalties for honour crimes by increasing the minimum jail term for people convicted of an honour-related crime from seven to 10 years and making the death penalty the maximum punishment for an honour crime, but it did not rule honour killing as intentional murder.

Meanwhile, the authorities’ handling of the case of Dr Shazia Khalid in Sui has also been widely criticized, particularly the official reposal of confidence in the innocence of a key suspect in the case. This has been cited as another example of the apparent lack of resolve in dealing firmly with crimes “dishonouring” women.

Confidence in the effort to uplift the status of women has also been shaken by the recent announcement that the number of seats in the union councils would be reduced from 21 to 13 in this year’s local body elections, thus reducing the reserved seats for women from six to three. This is effect reduces the percentage of women representation in the union councils. In terms of real numbers, the total number of women councillors in the country will apparently drop drastically to 18,000 from the previous 36,000.

Over in the NWFP — the only province where it was reported that in many districts women were not allowed to contest and to vote by local influential politicians in the 2001 local body elections — the situation for women is unlikely to change much in this year’s local government elections beginning from next month.

Although, soon after the 2001 elections, several women in the province had filed petitions in the high court against the practice of barring women from casting their votes, it was not until 2004 that the court finally dismissed the petitions on the grounds of constitutional technicalities involving its jurisdiction. Apart from a later high court ruling in the same year censuring the practice of barring women from voting as being “repugnant to the fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution”, there is really nothing more concrete available to stop those planning to keep women away from the ballot box again in the forthcoming local body polls.

The decision several years ago to increase the number of reserved women seats to an unprecedented 20 per cent in the assemblies and 33 per cent in the local councils was hailed as heralding a whole new chapter in the history of women development in Pakistan. These measures proved to be a political boon for women, as women parliamentarians and councillors took bold and meaningful steps towards gaining a deeper understanding of women’s issues and problems.

But recent incidents have eroded somewhat the earlier euphoria that women’s status in the society in general will indeed be uplifted by they being given their due rights. In fact, the president of the ruling PML was reported to have admitted while meeting a delegation from the PML women wing last week that still a lot had to be done, in terms of appropriate legislation, to end the centuries’ old exploitation of women and to give them their due rights and status in the society.

A positive development, however, is the surprise move by the Federal Shariat Court last Friday in overturning the controversial high court ruling a week earlier on the Mukhtar Mai case. Hopefully, this will herald a new era of cooperation by the Federal Shariat Court in the sensitive task of trying to improve the general status of women in the country.

RETIRED General Mirza Aslam Beg has recently mooted the idea of evolving a joint India-Pakistan nuclear security regime in South Asia. Besides helping the two neighbours establish ‘stable nuclear deterrence’ in the region, the strategy would also be ‘outsourcing our nuclear strikes to Iran’, he says.

Rather than wait for Iran to come under an ostensibly US-sponsored nuclear attack by Israel, Pakistan and India should join hands to pre-empt such a contingency. Such a joint India-Pakistan strategy, Beg argues, will be justified and patterned on the ‘US-Nato nuclear regime’.

Yet another argument advanced in support of ‘outsourcing’ joint India-Pakistan nuclear strikes is to ‘dissuade’ Iran from going nuclear. The proposed two-fold operational strategy will thus underwrite the defence of Iranian nuclear installations on the one hand, and keep Iran off the nuclear weaponization course, on the other.

The simple layman’s question is whether Iran will also approve of an India-Pakistan joint initiative to protect it from a nuclear attack? Furthermore, whether a pre-emptive strike by Pakistan and India against a contemplated attack might not be as destructive as the actual strike that may never come through.

Most of all who on earth are ‘we’ to compromise Iran’s national sovereignty and pride even by talking of ‘outsourcing’ its national security? Will a country and a nation historically as proud as Iran even look at an offer as unsolicited as an India-Pakistan joint venture to protect it against a nuclear attack?

Are Pakistan and India, by Gen Beg’s reckoning, seeking to act as the grand nuclear gendarmes of the Gulf like the late Shah of Iran in the 1970s? To quote Gen Beg: “Iran fears a nuclear capable Israel and (so) by outsourcing our nuclear strike to Iran, a credible nuclear deterrence will be established in the Gulf region, the West and South Asia.”

Such a strategy will also act as a ‘meaningful effort’ towards non-proliferation. The general goes on to quote from a Kissinger article (Dawn, Feb 26) to illustrate his point. Kissinger makes a strong case for achieving ‘clarity’ in non-proliferation policy vis-a-vis Iran.

“What strategy can best stop an Iranian nuclear weapons programme? How do we prevent the diplomatic process from turning into a means to legitimize proliferation rather than avert it?” Kissinger goes on to ask. Almost all of a piece with the ‘Beg doctrine’ urging India and Pakistan to ‘dissuade’ Iran from going nuclear. Is this somewhat uncanny convergence of ideas purely coincidental or part of sober, identical thinking?

The US-Nato paradigm proffered in support of ‘outsourcing’ (denationalizing?) national defence may lend weight to the impression of a US-South Asian convergence of views on Iran’s nuclear weapons programme and how best to stop it.

The general might do well to review his proposal in the light of the plain ineptness of any analogy between the US-Nato axis and the India-Pakistan joint plan for ‘outsourcing’ Iran’s nuclear defence. US and Europe stay under the Nato security umbrella as allies under a joint command and with a shared strategy and standardized weapons system. A joint defence arrangement, even a loose one, must therefore precede any attempt at ‘outsourcing’ Iran’s nuclear defence.

Above all, Iran must be convinced first of the rationale, capability and sincerity of purpose of Pakistan and India for rushing to its aid at their own initiative. In other words, whether their concern for the security of a major neighbour is actually based on altruistic motives?

Is Gen Beg assuming a regional-global role without putting our own subcontinental house in order?

Rather than talk of extending their protective nuclear arm to Iran, the two neighbours should be striving to create a nuclear-free South Asia. The concept of a South-Asian nuclear regime based on nuclear restraint and credible nuclear deterrence could at best serve as a cover-up for burgeoning nuclear ambitions on both sides of the divide.

The writer is a retired brigadier of the Pakistan Army.

THERE is obviously no logical link between Ambassador Zamir Akram, who is winding up an eventful tenure in Kathmandu to hit the ground running with a stint at the Pakistan prime minister’s office, and India’s rightwing Hindu revivalist Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, more notoriously known as the RSS.

But in their statements last week on the Maoist movement in Nepal and their respective prescriptions to stall it, there was remarkable convergence. Both have described the suspension of democracy in Nepal by a royal coup as an internal affair of the landlocked country.

Both want to arm King Gyanendra to crush the popular uprising that has threatened to topple him.

For the RSS the Nepali king represents the temporal as well as the spiritual embodiment of an ideal head of state eminently suited to the purposes of Hindutva fascism, now in an advanced experimental stage in India.

The Nepali king is considered the avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu, the one who sustains the world after Brahma created it.

That’s how even the post-democracy constitution still describes him as Shri Shri Shri Shri Shri, simply translated as “Shri 5” on the Nepali currency notes, a title that elevates the spiritual prowess of the king to that of the widely revered Hindu god.

At the temporal level the king represents the absolute power that Hindu upper castes wield in the state structure, ideal for the purposes of Hindutva of the kind the RSS is keen to promote in India.

Lost in the focus on the king’s struggle to keep his job as constitutional monarch is the reality that the Maoist movement aiming to overthrow him has gained a wide appeal among the lower caste Hindus and among those outside the caste pale.

This caste equation has become equally true of the so-called Naxalite movement fanning out across villages of major Indian states.

The take-over of political power by lower caste citizens in both countries is the real threat to the RSS and to King Gyanendra, not so much the violent means the rebels have resorted to, to get there.

And, therefore, it is not just the RSS that is livid with the Indian government’s decision to suspend its arms supplies to Kathmandu, but also Hindutva’s more fanatical phalanx, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP).

Any wonder that Praveen Togadia, co-author with Narendra Modi of the Gujarat pogrom of 2002, sees the Nepal situation in his own prejudiced way?

“If the king of Nepal had not imposed the emergency in Nepal, the Maoists could have reached Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh in India,” proclaims the VHP leader in comments published in an RSS newspaper.

“The government of India should support the step taken by the king and extend all possible help to crush the Maoist militancy.”

In a typically convoluted expression of the RSS variety he also warns that “with the help of China, the Maoists were becoming stronger and India needed to support Nepal at the moment.” He warns that if India does not support Nepal today, “China could adopt the Tibetan policy there.”

Ambassador Akram need not take Mr. Togadia’s hysteria too seriously. He is far too well aware of China and Pakistan sharing a common perspective on Nepal to believe that China would even consider advising the Maoists against the Nepal king, much less arm them.

But Mr Akram’s comments in an interview to the state-run daily, The Rising Nepal, need to be evaluated in a larger perspective. So far, it was commonplace that India’s discomfiture with its neighbours was Pakistan’s gain.

It would be a rare Pakistani diplomat who would not revel in the anti-India sentiments that pervade Bangladesh, or Sri Lanka, in Nepal or even the Maldives. But these negative feelings happen to be the result of bad diplomacy by New Delhi with the smaller countries rather the outcome of allergies injected by a third adversary.

The India-Pakistan battle in Nepal was beginning to look evenly poised before Mr. Akram spoke. First there was a long history of mistrust built around several factors among the more nationalist-minded Nepalis towards Indians.

This resulted in frequent incidents of violence targeting the Indian community in Kathmandu and elsewhere. The controversy surrounding Hritik Roshan was only the more recent one. But after Iraqi resistance in Iraq massacred the Nepali workers, anti-Muslim and anti-Pakistan violence burst out in Kathmandu, targeting several offices and mosques.

Now Mr Akram has gone and taken clear sides in this complex imbroglio. He was of course following what Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz had hinted at during a recent trip to Kathmandu.

“We have offered possibilities of training. We are also ready to provide arms if that is required by Nepal,” Mr Akram reportedly told the newspaper. There are no details of arms Islamabad was willing to give Nepal which needs anything from boots for its 80,000 soldiers to helicopters to ferry troops and attack guerilla hideouts in rugged hills and jungles.

The point to ponder is that Nepal is not in Pakistan’s immediate neighbourhood. President Gen. Pervez Musharraf arrived at the Saarc summit in Kathmandu using an air corridor through China, because of the then prevalent overflight bar on Pakistan aircraft by India.

With Pakistan’s offer of military help to Kathmandu, the situation begins to look a bit like the days when India began to meddle in Afghanistan despite having no access or purpose to be there in the 1980s. Is the trouble worth it to take sides in what we ourselves describe as the internal affair of a sovereign country? What if the so-called help boomerangs on Pakistan, the way the LTTE fiasco recoiled on India with tragic consequences? And look at the embarrassing company you get to keep in the bargain.

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Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front’s chief Yasin Malik has chosen a unique form of protest against Kashmiris being left out of the India-Pakistan peace process. He is launching in New Delhi on March 17 and 18 an exhibition of signatures, photographs and unedited video footage of Kashmiris.

The theme of the first-of-its-kind exhibition is Voices of Peace, Voices of Democracy - where views of ordinary people have been recorded to “highlight the right of Kashmiris to sit at the table for peace talks.”

Fifteen hundred thousand signatures, over 5,000 photographs and endless hours of video footage were meticulously collected over two years, with Malik and his group of boys travelling across the state, covering 5,000 villages in Jammu and Kashmir.

“It took us two years because villages in the remote areas are situated far from each other and the population density is quite thin. Also winters are out since the snow prevents you from moving in those areas,” says Yasin Malik.