Yesterday we watched the swearing in of our 20th prime minister and his band of motley men. Credit must be given to President General Pervez Musharraf for eliminating one lot of ultra-grand larcenists and oppressors of the people, and the benefit of the doubt given for having signed on some of the lesser of the species under the compulsive cause of expediency.

We must congratulate the president for having managed the swearing-in of just under 20 per cent of the gentler sex in a house of 342 members. Never in the past have we had such a formidable turnout of women. In our last national assembly of 217, six women sat in the house. Now, mainly thanks to the contentious Legal Framework Order embodied in the 1973 Constitution, we have 72 sitting women members.

Granted, they are slightly outnumbered by the new-found strength of the party of the religious front which possibly has its reservations as to where women stand exactly in the scheme of the Islamic republic, albeit they have women representatives of their own sitting in the women's enclosure in which the women appointed to the reserved seats are closeted, one being the daughter of the leader of the MMA coalition, the Qazi Hussain Ahmad of the Jamaat-e-Islami.

Depending on the level of agreement between the women, should they not first of all and immediately suggest that as equal citizens of Pakistan, under the Constitution, they be allowed to seat themselves where they wish?

As has been the case since the inception of this country, women have played a largely unacknowledged though crucial role - as they do universally - at every national level. They are the mothers of the present and future citizens of this country and it is their level of literacy, understanding and education that has a critical effect on the upbringing and mindset of their progeny.

Since the 1980s, for reasons of expediency, laws relating to the status of women have usually been made keeping in mind the viewpoint of, and pandering to, the obscurantist minority. Now that we have in the National Assembly 72 women legislators, women and their standing as citizens of this country must at last be accorded the priority they deserve as their fundamental, inalienable and constitutional right.

In this globalized world of the 21st century, no longer can a nation stand apart and away from internationally accepted norms. Pakistan has subscribed to the Vienna Declaration which recognizes women's rights as human rights; it made commitments at the Beijing World Conference on Women; and it has ratified the UN Convention for the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women. So far, not only has Pakistan not lived up to any of these high-flying declarations of intent, but it has reneged on its internationally-given word when it comes to the treatment allowed by its governments to be meted out to its women.

Domestic violence against women exists all over the country - in its cities, towns and villages - much of it incited by derogatory laws and customs which are justified, quite erroneously, in the name of Islam and based on retrograde interpretations quite alien to the true tenets and spirit of that great religion. And this despite the constitutional requirement laid down in Article 25 which deals with citizens' fundamental rights that nothing "shall prevent the state from making any special provision for the protection of women . . ."

Well, there is a mass of protection that must be accorded to the women of this country when it comes to the violence perpetrated against them in the name of the law, or in total disregard of recognized human rights when violence is actually condoned under the cover of false religious and outmoded tribal customs. How often do we read of gang rape, of the so-called honour killings and other murders for suspected adultery; of mutilations by acid throwing and other reprehensible physical acts; of incest; of public stripping and humiliation of women; of the trading of young girls under primitive tribal customs; of inhuman punishments under the Hudood Ordinances, of young girls being sold in marriage, and of marital violence, enforced prostitution and trafficking of women against which they have no legal recourse? Too often.

The female literacy rate falls far below that of the male literacy rate - the official figures given are around 25 per cent and as all official figures are grossly either over - or underestimated, the real rate probably lies somewhere around 10 to 15 per cent. As long as our women are kept illiterate, there can be no overall progress in the country. This has been amply illustrated in the case of Bangladesh which in the space of a quarter of a century has overtaken us on most fronts because from the very beginning its governments concentrated on the female literacy factor.

And take our annual birth rate, which is directly linked to the literacy factor. This last military government claims that it has brought it down from three per cent to 2.6 per cent, but this is not generally believed and is highly unlikely with the pathetic priority given to family planning. With a population growing at the rate of 10 births a minute, unless something radical is done to promote and ensure that family planning is freely available to our women and that they are made to understand that it is their right to control their fertility rate, which now stands at six, in the next twenty years this country will be so grossly overpopulated as to be undoubtedly ten times more unmanageable than it now is.

It is up to our 72 women representatives in the National Assembly and, of course, the women who will sit in our provincial assemblies to ensure that this time around there is no excuse for inactivity on the women's front or for shying away from the issue using any pretext.

What they should all do immediately is to arm themselves with the various reports compiled by the commissions set up to examine the dire state of women in this Islamic republic. The first commission on marriage and family laws was formed in 1955 and the report was presented six years later. Its recommendations were only accepted in a highly diluted form. They were defied in practice and are challengeable in our courts of law. Then came the Pakistan women's rights committee formed in 1975, chaired by the then attorney general of Pakistan, Yahya Bakhtiar, whose report was released in 1976. Nothing came of this. In 1981, the Pakistan commission on the Status of Women was set up and when its report was finalized in 1985, the days of Mard-i-Momeen Mard-i-Haq Ziaul Haq, it was naturally supressed.

Years later, in 1994, the Commission of Inquiry for Women came into being under the chairmanship of Justice Saad Saoud Jan. There was disagreement and wrangling over its composition and it was not until 1996 when Justice Nasir Aslam Zahid was appointed chairperson that serious work on the subject began. In August 1997, Justice Zahid's report was published and made available to us all. The honourable 72 would do well to carefully study this last report which embodies everything they need to know, tells them exactly what has to be done and how to do it - and get going.

Mohammad Ali Jinnah, on March 28, 1948, told his countrymen and women: "In the great task of building the nation and maintaining its solidarity women have a most valuable part to play, as the prime architects of the character of the youth that constitutes its backbone, not merely in their own homes but by helping their less fortunate sisters outside. I know that in the long struggle for the achievement of Pakistan, Muslim women have stood solidly behind their men. In the bigger struggle for the building of Pakistan that now lies ahead, let it not be said that the women of Pakistan had lagged behind or failed in their duty."

So far, through little fault of their own, they have lagged behind. Now it is high time that they move firmly onto the forefront.

Nasir Aslam Zahid's comprehensive report has been signed by the three men and seven women who were members of the commission: Yahya Bakhtiar, Masood Kausar, Asma Jehangir, Maulana Muhammad Tareen, Shaheen Sardar Ali, Shahla Zia, Shahnaz Javed, Fiza Junejo, Rehana Sarwar and Anisa Zeb.

The members of the gentler sex must unite. They form a powerful bloc, much in excess of their mathematical percentage. Our tireless fighter for human rights, Asma Jehangir, is forwarding to them all copies of the report. Its recommendations should be heeded. Let our women legislators immediately form a committee of implementation. Time is of the essence.