Aboard the Democracy Train (18 page)

The carefully made-up women exposed adaptations of risqué dresses worn by foreign models that one saw on
CNN
and the Indian
ZEE
television channels. Captivated by the glamorous images of women, their female viewers copied the fashions in the privacy of their homes and exposed them to other women.

Apparently, the spread of cable television in the remote areas of rural Sindh had created all sorts of unfulfilled desires among the cloistered women. On one occasion, I sat with the young wife of a feudal lord as she watched cable television in a remote town of Sindh. Turning away momentarily from watching a Western film, she sighed wistfully: “It’s very hard to be locked indoors
after living in Karachi.” Still, sensitive to small town gossip about who was a “good woman,” she had never left the house alone.

In the rare case where a young woman from a small town joined a university or medical college, she would likely join the urban women’s movement. Still, societal pressures on women to marry and have children were overwhelming. It left the women blissfully unaware that the military government had passed Islamic legislation that gave them an inferior status before the law.

Journeying through interior Sindh, I stumbled upon large numbers of unmarried, graying women who lived in ancestral homes located in Hyderabad, Thatta, Matiari and Hala. Time hung heavy on their hands. Equipped with little education and no exposure to the outside world, these women had never been exposed to men in their lives.

In 1992, during a journalistic jaunt, I discovered a horrendous custom that kept these women housebound. Under Islamic law, women inherit property when they marry. But in the absence of male relatives, feudals in Sindh refuse to give daughters their inheritance. Instead, big feudals of Sindh and southern Punjab, who derive their power base from the land, prefer to keep their daughters unmarried.

In a more elaborate example of how feudals manipulate women’s lives for financial gain, the Syed communities – who trace direct ancestry to Prophet Mohammed – have their daughters married off to the Muslim holy book, the Quran. That literally seals their prospects of marriage. Under this practice – called “
haq bakshna
” (waiver of rights), women place their hand on the Quran and waive the Islamic right to marry and inherit property. Even more ingeniously, they are told that their virginity gives them a spiritual status and a duty to dispense talismans to sick children.

The paradoxes were stunning. Feudal politicians took orders from a woman prime minister, Benazir Bhutto even as they kept
their own women locked up or “married to the Quran.” Some of them were superiors in her party and took orders from the woman prime minister to wield power in their own fiefdoms. The big feudals, who form the backbone of autocratic governments, have kept their control of women well-hidden from public view.

Benazir Bhutto’s first year and a half in power flew without her taking on the issue of women. But what was truly shocking was that after she was ousted in August 1990, opponents exploited her vulnerability as a woman and used rape to humiliate her female supporters.

Early one morning in November 1991, I received word that a friend of Benazir Bhutto, Veena Hayat – the daughter of a feudal politician and one of the founders of Pakistan, Sardar Shaukat Hayat – had undergone a traumatic experience.

Driving up to Veena’s home in Defense Society, I found her lying in bed, numb with shock and anger. Upper class and Western educated, Veena had lived alone – a rather rare occurrence in Pakistan’s society. Surrounded by friends, she told me in a voice shaking with anger that five armed men had barged into her residence late at night. They had cut off her telephone connections and proceeded to torment and rape her all night, asking about her connections with Benazir Bhutto, Asif Zardari and other key PPP figures.

Veena’s allegations made the headlines sizzle: she had blamed an advisor to the Sindh chief minister, Irfanullah Marwat who was also the son-in-law of Pakistan’s president, Ghulam Ishaq Khan. Although a poor washerwoman with PPP affiliations, Khursheed Begum had also been raped at gunpoint by armed thugs at around the same time, the response to her rape had been relatively muted.

In a third incident aimed at demoralizing the Benazir camp, her opponents had tortured a woman office-bearer of the PPP’s student wing, Rahila Tiwana. With Benazir seeking a return
to power, her women supporters were now being singled out for rape.

In the aftermath of Veena’s rape, press statements poured in calling for the arrest of the influential culprits. Veena’s father, Sardar Shaukat Hayat made headlines as he stepped into the fray. A former associate of the founder of Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah – the victim’s father – headed a
jirga
(a consultative assembly of male tribal elders) that demanded Marwat be punished. Upper-class women rallied around the Hayat family to demand an end to the use of rape as a political weapon.

Still, as in so many incidents, the well-connected accused were never brought to trial. Instead, coming after the attacks on journalists, the outrage at Veena Hayat’s rape would become one more incident which eroded confidence in the Nawaz Sharif government and helped pave the way for Benazir Bhutto to return to power for a second term.

In 1993, women cheered as Benazir returned to power. For urban, professional educated women it was one more opportunity to win women’s rights and repeal discriminatory laws. The more established women’s organizations like All Pakistan Women’s Association and the Federation of Business and Professional Women held city-wide events to express pride that Benazir had risen to the unique position of becoming the twice-elected woman prime minister of a Muslim country.

This time, Benazir tried to fulfill some promises by appointing women in top governmental positions. The move did not sit well with members of the civil service, who suddenly found themselves yanked aside by the PPP’s political appointees. They complained that the positions had been doled out by Benazir to gain loyalty for her party rather than on the basis of merit.

The PPP’s opportunity to bring change for women arose around the 1995 Fourth World Women Conference in Beijing. By then, my reputation as a reporter espousing women’s rights
was firmly established. Despite my critical reporting on the PPP government, I was invited to Islamabad to help prepare a National Report to recommend a Platform for Action in 13 key areas ear-marked by the United Nations.

The NATREP, as it was called, was to be presented to international delegates at Beijing. As the head of the “Women and Media” group, I spent weeks in Islamabad writing a chapter for NATREP with wide-ranging recommendations for women. Shortly thereafter, the PPP government nominated a few of us from the non-governmental sector to form part of their government delegation to Beijing.

At a personal level, it was wonderful to be in China – part of the 30,000 women who had arrived from all over the world to work for the advancement of women around the world. We were bused from our grandiose hotel to the splendid, towering site of the UN meeting.

As representatives of respective governments, we partook in the proceedings in a grand hall with microphones attached to our desks. These were lengthy legal agreements on which governments from different continents deliberated and which took into consideration the religions and cultures of participating nations.

Privately, the male leader of our delegation, Masood Khan – then a UN representative in New York – had forewarned us against making interventions, saying he would do most of the talking. Still, as the global body debated on the plight of poor women, my companion, Tahira Mazhar Ali Khan – a senior women’s rights activist from Pakistan – took the microphone and spoke passionately on how the world needed to reduce defense spending to better serve women.

It was nothing I could disagree with. But the outburst scandalized one of the more loyal members of our delegation; to my amusement, she flew out of the room to complain to the male head of the delegation about the digression.

Like the Nigerian delegation, which ranked as the most corrupt in the world, our government delegates dressed fastidiously. The head of our delegation, Salma Waheed – tall, imposing and
elegantly dressed – was approached by someone and asked if she was a princess. Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto – who wore an exquisitely tailored
shalwar kameez
and arrived with glowing complexion – cut a glamorous figure. World leaders who had packed the hall, strained in their seats to hear the woman Prime Minister of Pakistan speak.

I had no doubt that Benazir would take the global community by storm, speaking articulately as she did about the measures taken by the PPP government on behalf of the women of Pakistan. The PPP’s National Report (NATREP), which recommended actions for women in Pakistan, was so slick that we ran out of the copies for other delegates.

Personally, I had less reason to be impressed by Benazir’s eloquence, knowing of the bitter realities for women back home. Indeed, nothing had changed from the report compiled in 1985 by the Commission on the Status of Women. The commission, headed by Begum Zari Sarfaraz, had made a bold report under Gen. Zia. Having traveled the length and breadth of Pakistan, she conveyed the reality that rings true even today: “The average rural woman of Pakistan is born in near slavery, leads a life of drudgery and dies invariably in oblivion.”

As a government delegate from a poor developing country like Pakistan, I was uneasy with the luxurious scale of our accommodations in Beijing. The lobby was spectacular, complete with a cascading waterfall reflected on moving glass escalators. Each one of us had a spacious room that overlooked the starry lights of Beijing.

And yet, on my query to an emissary of Pakistan’s ambassador to China as to why they had not arranged for a more economical hotel, the answer was: “Why do you bother...it’s only the government’s money?”

At the end of the day, our delegation had minimal impact on the “Outcomes Document” adopted at Beijing. While the PPP government agreed in principle to implement the far-reaching recommendations at the Fourth World Women’s Conference, my time in Beijing had convinced me that the government was making speeches merely for diplomatic consumption.

Still, every weekend, I flew to Islamabad on government expense to join women’s groups to make good on the promises made at the Fourth World Women’s Conference. Indeed, Benazir’ government had promised a Platform of Action that would incorporate sweeping changes to uplift women’s lot in the government’s national Five-Year Plan. The weeks rolled by and I found myself in an endless web of planning.

By 1996, I wondered whether the recommendations we had submitted in the NATREP would ever take effect. The government had signed the Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in March 1995. Still, all discriminatory laws passed by General Zia ul Haq remained unchanged. Moreover, there was no relief in sight for the millions of women trapped by illiteracy and poverty.

Apparently, the establishment also took stock of the money drained from the national exchequer. In August 1996, as I worked in Islamabad on the Five-Year Plan for Women, a panic rumor did the rounds that Benazir’s government was about to be sacked. As a journalist who knew that the military called the shots, I sensed that Benazir’s time had come.

That evening, I flew back to Karachi to learn that the rumor was true. Benazir and her elected government had been sacked for the second time – once again on familiar charges of corruption and failure to control the deteriorating law and order situation.

At the festive Fourth World Women Conference there had been little to suggest that twelve years later, Benazir Bhutto would be assassinated and her husband, Asif Zardari would lead a nation that would slip to hit almost rock bottom in the World Economic Forum’s rankings of nations with a global gender gap.

With image being everything, the Zardari government moved quickly to show it was serious about women’s rights. In 2009, its preparations for International Women’s Day’s were kicked off with a government emissary’s phone call to a founder member
of the Women’s Action Forum, Anis Haroon, that she had been nominated to head the Pakistan Commission on the Status of Women. As someone who takes the issue of women’s rights quite seriously, Anis told the concerned quarters she would think about the proposition and get back to them.

“But by the evening, I received congratulations from my friends. Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani had already announced my name on television,” she shared with me.

In March 2010, Anis headed a government delegation to the Beijing Plus 15 conference in New York. Afterwards, she talked about her government’s success in passing a bill against the harassment of women in the work place. President Asif Zardari had signed the parliamentary bill even though his own party members had opposed it. The bill became law after it was assisted by a women’s parliamentary caucus that cuts across party lines.

Although it was a good gesture, its passage just a few days before International Women’s Day 2010 appeared largely symbolic. Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani, while strengthening the Commission on the Status of Women had also appointed a dozen, mostly conservative, members to the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII). This “balancing act” of the PPP government would annul progressive measures for women.

In August 2009, for example, the CII shot down a bill against domestic violence introduced by women parliamentarians in the National Assembly, arguing it would “fan unending family feuds and push up divorce rates.” Similarly, there are measures that the Women’s Commission would like to take on behalf of women, but are likely to be vetoed by the CII.

In May 2010, the women’s parliamentary caucus held a largely symbolic regional convention of women parliamentarians in Islamabad to search for ways of empowering women and bring peace to the strife-ridden region. While the convention came up with good recommendations to end violence against women, a woman parliamentarian told me what they really needed was “implementation.”