MUKHTARAN Mai has often been referred to as a symbol of women’s empowerment in Pakistan. She was subjected to a gang rape in a village in southern Punjab (Meerwala) on June 22, 2002, professedly to avenge a sex offence that her 12-year old brother had allegedly committed.

Instead of killing herself, as some of the folks in her village expected, she filed a complaint with the police on June 30 upon the urging of the local imam, who also brought in a journalist to interview her. As a result, news of the event spread. Foreign media (including organs such as the BBC, Time magazine, the New York Times) gave it extensive coverage.

On July 5, General Pervez Musharraf awarded Mukhtaran Mai a sum of 500,000 rupees to help her rehabilitation. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, who had published several articles about her ordeal, collected $130,000 for her. On August 3 the government of Pakistan awarded her the Fatima Jinnah gold medal in recognition of her bravery. She pursued her case through a succession of courts, undaunted by threats to her life and limb.

Responding to invitations from organisations concerned with human rights and women’s empowerment in England, Western Europe, and the United States she visited these countries in October 2005, addressed press conferences and spoke at other forums. An American fashion magazine, Glamor, named her its woman of the year. With the assistance of a journalist, Marie-Therese Cuny, she prepared her memoir, which was published in France and Germany in January 2006. It is scheduled to appear in the United States in October 2006 under the title: In the Name of Honour: A Memoir. On May 2, 2006 she addressed a group at the United Nations headquarters in New York. The Council of Europe has nominated her for its annual North-South prize, which she will receive later this year in Lisbon. Mukhtaran Mai is indeed a celebrity.

The movement for women’s empowerment does not call for their dominance over men; it seeks for them the same access as men have to employment, political participation and representation, economic opportunity and resources, directive roles in society, and rights under law. Empowerment means giving persons the capability to improve their own lives and the environment in which they live.

Awareness of self-worth on the part of women is a pre-condition of their empowerment. When they begin to feel they can hold authority, influence others, and operate in leadership roles on the same terms as men, they have become empowered. Knowledge is essential to sensible decision-making in all areas of endeavour, meaning that women’s equal access to education in all disciplines and at all levels is also a pre-requisite of their empowerment.

Self-reliance, initiative, ambition, exceptional native ability, unusually favourable circumstances, and fortunate coincidences may enable a specific woman to attain spectacular success in her chosen domain. But the rise of Mrs Indira Gandhi in India or Ms Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan to high public office should not be taken to mean that women in these countries have generally achieved empowerment.

In most societies, the law does not stop women’s advancement, and in many of them, including Pakistan, they have established their presence in government and politics, business and industry, professions, the arts and the arenas of sports and entertainment. If their presence in these areas has not reached the same level as that of men, the reasons for it stem from custom and tradition rather than constraints imposed by the state.

During the 19th century and the first two or three decades of the 20th century, “ladies” in England would have been horrified at the thought of a woman contesting election to parliament, let alone becoming a police officer. A woman lawyer would have had great difficulty convincing her male colleagues and potential clients that she, in spite of being a woman, was capable of arguing a case to a successful conclusion before a judge and jury. Women have come a long way towards equality with men since then.

In our own time there are doubtless women who enjoy exercising power and influence in the world of affairs. There are some who like to be out doing things and interacting with other people in the workplace. Then there are those who accept the drudgery of an uninspiring nine-to-five job mainly to bring home a second income to maintain a higher living standard. But one will also encounter ladies who, while endorsing women’s empowerment as a concept, have no interest in many of the roles that men have typically performed. They would rather keep house and raise children and, if they can afford it, have “tea” and play bridge with their friends than go to work or become political activists. There are certain dimensions of empowerment to which many women do not subscribe at all, such as, for instance, the right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.

Women’s empowerment has to take place within the context of a country’s culture, and the forms it may take will depend on that country’s stage of social, economic, and political modernisation. Women cannot attain equality with men if they are ignorant and economically dependent upon their fathers or husbands. In Pakistan well-educated women have been entering government, politics, business, and the professions in increasing numbers during the last 30 years. They still have some distance to go but they are getting there.

Pakistani women are not doing well where the prevailing societal attitudes inhibit their progress. They have taken places, a large number of them, in the national and provincial legislatures and local councils, but that is the case because seats in these bodies have been reserved for them.

I cannot think of more than just a few of them who contested for parliament against men candidates and won. A report in a Lahore newspaper (October 4, 2002) had it that 32 MQM women contested the 2002 election for general seats, but it is not known if any of them won. (More than 20 women ran in the recent parliamentary elections in neighbouring Kuwait, and none of them won.)

Several non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are out in the field working to enhance women’s capability to improve their lives and their effectiveness in dealing with their social and cultural environment. They are spreading literacy, imparting income-generating skills, instructing women in setting up small business enterprises and giving them access to modest loans. They are also teaching women how to organise themselves for community improvement projects and assume leadership roles. These are all small-scale endeavours — touching the lives of thousands, not millions of them — but they do point the way to go for those who want to enhance the Pakistani woman and her contribution to the nation’s development and modernisation.

In a society such as Pakistan’s, the first order of business for a reformer must be to get women released from the frightfully harsh conditions and constraints under which many of them live. There are instances in which a father has killed his daughter because she married a man of her own choosing without parental consent. In other cases, her own relatives have gone to the police to accuse her of fornication and opened her to penalties under Islamic law. (A report in this newspaper on June 29 tells us of a Pakistani living in Denmark who shot his daughter dead and wounded her spouse because she had married him despite his opposition.) Women who have been raped, and cannot produce four credible witnesses to the event, also become liable to be prosecuted for adultery or fornication.

Tribal custom allows a father to give one or more of his daughters away in marriage to old men of a rival clan as compensation for some wrong done to one of its members. Domestic violence is a universal phenomenon, and Pakistan seems to have more than its share of it. Husbands feel free to hit and otherwise abuse their wives for trivial reasons. Vigilantes, roaming the streets as self-appointed moral policemen, pour acid upon and disfigure young women wearing make-up or if, in their view, they do not meet the appropriate standards of modesty. Some of these wrongs will be mitigated as women get educated and become economically independent. Others may be eradicated as society accepts modernisation in a larger measure than it does now. More intractable are the wrongs that emanate from ideological persuasions reinforced by law. Such are the tribulations and sufferings of women accused of fornication or adultery and those subjected to rape. I should like to add a word about them.

If requirements of the Islamic law (four pious Muslim men who have witnessed the act of carnal conjunction) are to be met, allegations of fornication and adultery will be virtually impossible to establish. The problem arises with regard to the woman who has been raped and who, instead of agonising quietly, wants something to be done about it and her assailant to be punished.

She cannot be helped if she cannot name him. But if she does identify the rapist, the police in their present practice will require her to produce four witnesses to the event, failing which they may treat her own complaint as proof of her involvement in fornication and prosecute her. This is an absurd procedure.

This procedure has recently been a subject of debate in several television talk shows. It has been pointed out that, generally speaking, rapists do not attack their victim in the presence of witnesses. I was pleased to hear an Islamic scholar in one of these shows argue that there was no reason to proceed against the woman alleging rape, that the police investigating her allegation should rely on circumstantial evidence, including forensic pathology and DNA tests, and that this recourse should be satisfactory to Islamic jurists. I hope his reasoning gains general acceptance among our ulema and lawmakers.

The writer is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, US. Email: anwarsyed@cox.net

FOR two generations now, Pakistan’s civil servants and military commanders have worked together for long spells to manage the affairs of the country. During the rule of Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan and Ziaul Haq there were martial law administrators down to the district level.

But they reinforced the authority of the civil servants rather than interfered with their functions. Though not entirely free of stress or suspicion, it was a relationship marked by cordiality and cooperation.

With the passage of time the army administrators receded into the background. The face of martial law remained visible only at the centre and in the provincial capitals. Under the military regimes mentioned above, once the chief martial law administrator and his associates got rid of certain civil servants (more to demonstrate their authority than to purge corrupt and incompetent elements) they left the civil hierarchy to work on its own.

The contact of the provincial martial law administrator (or governor) with the civil administration in the field was mostly through the commissioner and deputy inspector-general of police in the division and through the deputy commissioner and superintendent of police in the district. It would do well to illustrate here the trust and courtesy that characterised the relationship between the martial law administrators and the civil officials through specific instances.

In 1962, an army vehicle drove into Mohmand tribal territory ignoring the signal of the levies at the barrier to stop and identify its occupants. When the incident was reported to the political agent he wrote a letter of protest to the corps headquarters. No reply was received but some days later he was invited by the corps commander to tea at his house. After a short discussion the corps commander conceded that it was wrong for the jeep not to have stopped at the barrier and the political agent regretted the curt tone of his letter.

But then the corps commander was no other than Altaf Qadir, the brother of Manzoor Qadir and, more endearing to hacks and intellectuals alike, Riaz Qadir. And the political agent was a raw youth, overly conscious of his exclusive tribal domain, but the episode won him the goodwill of the corps commander. In today’s circumstances the outcome would have been suspension.

In the years of transition from Ayub Khan to Yahya Khan came along administrators or governors from the armed forces, including Atiqur Rehman, Nur Khan, S.M. Ahsan, Rakhman Gul, and later, in the Ziaul Haq years, , Jehan Dad Khan, S. M. Abbasi and Iqbal Khan. Their calibre and temperament differed but not their opinion that the administration had to be run by civil servants, and that the presence of martial law should only help them run it better. Courtesy towards them was their common virtue.

Gen Atiqur Rehman, when governor of West Pakistan, on visits to Karachi would never fail to thank the local administration for an odd water tanker sent once in a while to his mothers house. His predecessor, Air Marshal Nur Khan, would not agree to buy a new car to replace the old one that tended to stall when transporting him from the airport to the guest house. Admiral S.M. Ahsan on his occasional visits from East Pakistan would insist that the deputy commissioner should not receive him at the airport for he had come not on official duty but to see his family. When told that it was for the pleasure of it he would invite him to tea at his house. Gen Rakhman Gul, Sindhs first governor after the break-up of One Unit, abolished all discretionary allotments ignoring even the recommendations coming from the president. Credit for that also went to an acquiescent Yahya Khan for not pressing.

In the first year of Ziaul Haq’s martial law, Benazir Bhutto was detained in her father’s Clifton home. When Sindh’s home secretary permitted a British friend of Ms Bhutto to stay with her it caused a furore in Islamabad as Benazir Bhutto was supposed to be kept incommunicado under the orders of the chief martial law administrator.

To boot, the intelligence agencies had reported that the “friend” was in fact on a spying mission. Sensing the trouble ahead for his home secretary, Gen Iqbal, Sindh’s martial law administrator, informed Islamabad not to worry and let him take care of the situation. All that he had to say to the home secretary was that he should have, at least, informed him about the visitor. (She was, it then transpired, Victoria Schofield, not a spy but an investigative journalist, who later wrote a book on the ordeal of the Bhutto family).

The military administrators ceased to come in that mould once Zia’s Islamism took hold which his chief staff officer and close confidante, Gen K.M. Arif, has now conceded was a facet of the dictator’s hypocrisy.

General Musharraf struck at the very root of the time-tested military-civil collaboration when he informed the nation in his very first broadcast that the commissioner “does nothing” and the deputy commissioner considers himself a “king” and went on to abolish both offices. He promised to make the police accountable to the people but ended up by making it a tool of party politics.

In place of career civil servants he has chosen to administer the country through intelligence agents and politicians defecting from their parent parties in search of power.

The extravagance, ineptitude and sheer number of the assorted ministers has made them a laughing stock. Where former Governor Nur Khan wouldn’t have even one new car, the current flunkies now cruise in limos.

The cost to the country of destroying the civil service, politicising the police and subverting political parties has been enormous and keeps mounting. If we cannot have fair, free and early elections, martial law might be a better alternative to the bedlam that exists now. It will be our good luck if it turns out to be a martial law in the style of Atiqur Rehman, Rakhman Gul or Iqbal Khan.