AS Imran Khan’s tirades against election irregularities continue unabated, one is tempted to remind him that, as self-anointed leader of the country’s massive population of young people, he was supposed to win a landslide victory in last year’s election. Given that almost two-thirds of Pakistanis are under 25 years of age, and the great Khan had them all under his spell, no amount of pre-poll rigging should have mattered anyway.

Of course, Pakistan’s young people cannot all be neatly clumped together with no consideration for class, ethnicity, gender and much else. Rhetorical claims aside, right-wing populists in today’s Pakistan inevitably fail to make good on their lofty promises — whether they lay claim to power through the ballot box or mythical ‘revolutions’ — because ‘the people’ are anything but the monolith that their sloganeering suggests.

It is nevertheless worth dwelling on the rhetoric to get a sense of what categories are considered to have political traction. So, a Qadri, Khan or Sharif will invoke the ‘poor’, the ‘youth’ and even the ‘minorities’ regularly in their speeches and propaganda literature. Such populists might even raise questions about the mistreatment of certain ethnic groups. But no one ever mentions women.

Pakistan is amongst the most patriarchal societies in the world, and there is simply no question of articulating a political project seeking fundamental change without foregrounding the oppression and exclusion of women, and popularising a programme to dismantle patriarchal structures. Yet there is not a single mainstream party in the country that is willing and able to make the liberation of women a major plank of their political discourse, let alone practice.

None of the mainstream parties speaks for women.

This is not to suggest that these parties do not mobilise women or that they do not appeal to women voters. The MQM is able to bring out hundreds of thousands of women for public rallies in Karachi. The PTI has also managed to attract a substantial number of women in urban centres to its cause. Even the overtly religious parties realise that they need to speak to women because they are as significant a demographic as any in society.

But such instrumentality cannot hide the fundamental fact that none of these parties speaks for women, or is even concerned with challenging patriarchy. And that is unlikely to change anytime soon.

This invisibility of women in political discourse is evident when one looks at media representations as well. The vast majority of stories in the print and electronic press with regard to women depict them as ‘victims’, or, if the story is not of the grim variety, emphasise a ‘human interest’ angle. A direct link between women and politics is forged only when one comes across reports on donor-funded events behind closed doors on something like reserved seats in local body elections.

The message conveyed through the formal educational apparatus is even more dismal. Anecdotes are provided about ‘famous’ women in history, such as Fatima Jinnah. In short, these women’s ‘fame’ derives from the fact that they were loyal confidantes of their husbands/brothers/fathers.

All in all, there is neither a meaningful feminist discourse nor politics to speak of in contemporary Pakistan. This is in spite of the exorbitant amounts of money that have been spent on raising the profile of so-called ‘women’s issues’ by NGOs over the past two decades. In effect these initiatives have succeeded in creating an instrumental space for ‘women’s issues’ in mainstream politics without actually facilitating a coherent poli­tical project for women’s libera­tion.

Some might argue that the PTI and even the MQM are re­latively pro­gres­sive parties be­cause there are some women in their decision-making bodies and they make an attempt to bring women out onto the streets. This is akin to suggesting that the Democratic Party in the US is a more progressive party vis-à-vis women than the Republican Party.

In truth neither of the two big parties in the US is committed to structural alternatives in which women of all backgrounds will be liberated from violence, exclusion and exploitation. Have they presided over a gradual improvement in women’s lives over the two centuries or so that they have been in existence? Yes. Have these parties themselves become less patriarchal over time? Yes.

But surely it is not enough to settle for mediocrity. Progressives out there committed to women’s liberation must seek to build a political project accordingly.

Only an organised party of the left can speak for women, whether in Pakistan, or anywhere else in the world. Vesting any hope in right-wing populism is at best naïve and at worst equivalent to being complicit in a politics of patriarchy.

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, July 18th, 2014