Saturday, 7 February 2015

SAFETY OF WOMEN IN PAKISTAN

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00483/a150151a-5a90-11e3-_483942k.jpg
Fatima Bhutto
Fatima Bhutto’s novel, The Shadow of the Crescent Moon, draws heavily on the pervasive violence in her country
This is what it is like to be a woman in Pakistan today.
Walking across an airport you are told by a stranger, a man in an ironed shirt, a leather belt with a silver buckle and jeans turned-up at the ankle, to cover yourself properly because a peephole of skin — your collarbone, your leg, your stomach — has shown through your salwar kameez. Applying for a visa to Malaysia you are told that as a Pakistani woman you will need to provide a return ticket to prove you are not travelling to the great Islamic state to work as a prostitute (the consulate will not ask a French woman for the same anti-prostitution proof, as though only Pakistani women are suspicious enough to wish to spend that much time in dreary Malaysia).
Filling out any government form — your national identity card, your passport, bank papers — you are asked for two names besides your own: your husband’s or your father’s. A rape victim in this country is required to have police approval before a hospital can perform a rape test on her (and to get police approval you must first file a police report — no easy matter — as the strict Sharia Hudood Ordinance punishes women for sex outside of marriage and for adultery, automatically criminalising all rape victims.
Moving across your city, you are unsafe. You cannot ride an auto rickshaw at night. On a bus you must sit in a section in the front, two rows of plastic covered seats divided off from the rest of the vehicle by a metal cage so no one can touch you or see you. Footsteps are forbidden, who can walk in cities that never built pavements? Only streets and stop signs for those wealthy enough to drive cars.
Millions of women across South Asia – not just here but in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka – suffer at the hands of unfair systems every single day. There is no force that doesn’t make its impact felt against women — political, economic, social and even familial inequities are a daily battle. We imagine that violence towards women only counts if it’s physical, if it’s brutal, but there are those silent, terrifying violences too.
My novel, The Shadow of the Crescent Moon, was born out of the notion of this pervasive violence and how it has disturbed the lives and imaginations of young Pakistanis. When I began writing, I thought I was telling the story of three brothers who set out towards the mosque for Friday prayers separately, they cannot go together. It’s too dangerous, too violent and they do not want to take the chance of the family being together in case the mosque is attacked. But like real life, somewhere in the process, two women characters took over. No one suffers Pakistan’s violence and alienation more than the country’s youth, especially its women. And it is ordinary women, and the trials they must suffer and struggle through, that are the heart of my novel.
It has not always been like this. There have been moments when young people here lived perfectly ordinary, banal lives. Those who can shut off the poverty and the violence and cordon their life off from the rest of the country still do. But whoever you are, there’s no doubt that life has changed immeasurably. Pakistan is, after all, in the crosshairs of the War on Terror. Since 2004 America has launched 380 drone strikes against Pakistan, our cities are plagued by countless suicide attacks and there are quasi civil wars being fought across the northern frontiers. Karachi, where I live, has 12-hour electricity outages, water shortages, gas shortages. YouTube has been blocked by the State for the past 14 months, on account of “un-Islamic content” — this is in a country where more than two thirds of the population are under 30 (I’m 31).
To be a woman in Pakistan, in particular, you have to be a fighter. You cannot be anything else. Pakistani women are often cast as docile, weak, secondary figures by those who know little of the country. There is a singular impression of the hunkered down, frightened woman — but I don’t know any women like that here.
Many years ago my friend Sabeen was stopped by apolicemen in Karachi for being a young woman out at night. They thought they could scare her, threaten a bribe out of her. But Sabeen, whose political activist father was assassinated by the police when she was a teenager, was unafraid. She noted down their badge numbers and visited the local police station in the morning to complain. She had a right to be free, to move without fear, to live unimpeded by her age or her gender. No city — not even one as terrifying as Karachi can be, with its gang warfare, daylight shootings and corrupt police force — can take that away from women like Sabeen. And this is a country made up of women like Sabeen.
To live in a country haunted by fear and violence poisons one’s imagination, as the Sri Lankan novelist Romesh Gunesekera would say. You learn how to distinguish between gunfire — Kalashnikovs fired into the midnight sky to celebrate a wedding or a birth have a different melody to machinegun bursts meant to kill. Rubble, dirt and debris scattered along the city are no longer symptoms of a lazy and inefficient Government, they can only be the remnants of terrible destruction. The mind cannot process data any differently. “Look! A bomb went off here!” a friend screamed one day, pointing at routine roadworks on Shahrah-e-Faisal [a main road in Karachi]. He did not believe me when I told him otherwise.
In 1996 the Government repealed the Execution of the Punishment of Whipping Ordinance, which prescribed the flogging of convicts, but the Government didn’t repeal the punishment under the Hudood Ordinance — so women convicted of adultery or the crime of premarital sex can still be whipped in Pakistan. There is no safety for women under the laws in Pakistan, none. You learn how not to speak, how not to share, how to keep your thoughts hidden under lock and key because even the walls have ears here.
To misspeak — to criticise the wrong man, to love the wrong faith, to follow the wrong god — can be a death sentence in Pakistan. You learn to distrust each other, to fear each other and no feeling remains free of suspicion — not love, not belief, not even bravery.
This is the same country where 15-year-old Malala Yousafzai was shot for demanding girls’ rights to education. Yet only a country like this could have produced a Malala, unbowed by the terror around her, imbued with a courage to carry on her fight no matter the odds.
An Indian friend, Karishma — another country whose women are warriors — once told me that to her, Pakistan personifies resilience. Against all that is stacked against it, against the backdrop of indiscriminate, continual violence, Pakistan perseveres. And it does so on the shoulders of extraordinary women.


No comments:

Post a Comment