August 10, 2006

Should Pakistanis be celebrating the fact that following two decades of sustained struggle, amendments to the Hudood Ordinance (HO) are actually being processed? It would be a great day for all of us, undoubtedly, if that unjust and unjustified Ordinance were to be repealed. Still, while not quite a victory, the amendments signal a breakthrough of sorts and Pakistani women should waste not a minute to make the most of the opportunity it provides.

They need to charge into the breach and launch a mass movement to secure equality and human rights from the feudal/tribal/ orthodoxy that is steadily eroding their freedom and pushing the female population into the dark ages. If you don’t believe me just look at any daily paper’s domestic news pages. “Young girl and her mother killed for ‘honour,” “In-laws seek custody of three-year-old bride,” “Husband shoots wife to death,” etc.

The stories of what is being done to hapless women and even little girls get more gruesome by the day. Swara, karo kari, rape, child marriage, wife burning –– the list continues to grow. There is also the law passed by our rich and powerful MNAs which grants nationality to a Pakistani man’s foreign wife but not to a Pakistani woman’s foreign husband. Clearly, it’s time for a women’s mass movement which will surely need to be joined by all right thinking and fair minded men.

The irony is that in Pakistan these rights have been granted to women by their religion as well as the Constitution. But like the UN resolutions on Kashmir or Palestine, these are honoured more in the breach. So where do we begin? Let’s take a cursory look at the women of India who just 59 years back were our fellow citizens. Unlike us, they faced enormous religious, cultural and social handicaps but in the cities at least have, since independence, largely made up for lost ground.

According to published statistics, India today has the largest number of professionally qualified women in the world. There are more highly qualified women doctors, surgeons, scientists and professors in India than in the U.S. In fact India has more working women than any other country, except perhaps China. Women own businesses, run organisations and are found in all high-tech and other specialised endeavours. A key factor in the impressive growth trajectory of the Indian economy in recent years is the strong participation of its women in the country’s economic sector.

But since “for every truth you find in India, the opposite is equally true,” it also has the world’s worst maternal mortality rate, aggravated by the menace of child brides, and a huge HIV problem. While urban South Indian women are achieving major economic successes, rural women continue to face the same poverty, female infanticide, sexual harassment, and lack of education and job skills as in all Third World countries.

In India, the preference for sons is so acute that an imbalance is developing in the ratio of men and women. According to one writer: in Rajasthan, they are trying to solve the problem created by the shortage of women, by resorting to a historical antecedent allowing a bride to be regarded as the wife of all her husband’s brothers as well. Even today, women and untouchables are forbidden to know, hear or read the Vedas – the sacred Hindu texts. As for inheritance, mostly it is only the sons who come into the family wealth, and married daughters are not considered part of their father’s family. Widows of course have no status. Barring the freedom and high achievements of urban Indian women, the oppression of females in India, especially in the vast rural hinterland, remains intense and entrenched.

In our country, it is the middle and upper middle class women who are making great strides and adding excitement and depth to their lives and to that of their society in general. But their success is only serving to increase the dichotomy between these educated and liberated women from relatively progressive and open-minded families and their rural and slum sisters. So sharply divided are the classes becoming that Pakistani upper middle class women now seem to have more in common with women of the same class in the developed countries than with women from a different class in their own country.

The much-vaunted trickle down effect has proved unworkable not just in economic but also in cultural matters. We all know that education and a better standard of living are needed to bridge the otherwise widening gap between women of different classes. While the split between the men is also vast, at least the lower middle class men can experience modern life by being up and about at work, unlike the cribbed, cloistered and covered up Pakistani women, whose only contact with the world outside their homes are the Indian films they watch on TV endlessly.

In their effort to make a mark in the professional and business worlds, educated women here have to pay a price. They have to step beyond their appointed role in life as prescribed for them by tradition and enforced by our religious leaders known for their myopic focus on the Muslim female. If these leaders were to remove their blinkers they’d see that both the world and the times have changed. Pakistanis, both women and men, should be adapting to the 21st century, not yearning for past glories.

Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window)