Mukhtaran Mai — down but not out

Mai’s decision to stay put and set up schools for local girls served to challenge stereotype of women as submissive.

Many things have stuck in my mind since I first read In the Name of Honour, Mukhtaran Mai’s ghostwritten memoir. Though it is not, perhaps, politically correct or timely to say so, one of these things is the way in which she cast aspersions on the character of the woman with whom her brother was falsely accused first of having illicit relations, then of raping.

“Girls are supposed to keep their eyes modestly downcast, but Salma — she does whatever she wants. She is not afraid of being looked at, and she even makes sure that she is!” Mai goes on to say that she doubts Salma was a virgin, even though, as an unmarried woman she was supposed to be chaste. Her musings preceded the medical examination that would ultimately confirm that the young woman had first begun to be sexually active around three years prior to this and that her last encounter occurred some time before the date of her alleged rape by Mai’s 12-year-old brother.

Rightly or wrongly, I was slightly taken aback that Mai, who had herself been through so much — including hearing that many of the local women believed she had brought her 2002 panchayat-sponsored gang rape upon herself by not entering into a marriage-reconciliation deal with her attackers and should, therefore, commit suicide — would resort to such superficialities.

Yet this is nothing compared to the Supreme Court’s observation that Mai had no need to let social stigma delay her registering an FIR against her alleged attackers. She, after all, was a grown woman, a divorcee no less. Thus, she had less to lose than a young unmarried virgin.

Although the court has acquitted five of the six accused in this case, on the basis of insufficient evidence on the prosecution’s part, Mai is set to launch an appeal; fulfilling the pledge she made to herself back in 2002: “Before, I had lived in absolute submission; now my rebellion will be equally relentless.”

But the last nine years have been anything but easy.

“If I were educated, if I could read and write, everything would be so much easier,” she noted as she embarked on her long quest for legal justice. Indeed, Mai’s illiteracy highlights the nexus between education and at least the chance of accessing justice. Being unable to read or write left her, from the beginning, prey to those in power. Unable to understand the statements written on her behalf by the police, she was pressured to simply thumbprint documents. One was even totally blank. This is something that the court should have taken into consideration when questioning the apparent discrepancies in her recorded statements.

Even more shocking, at least to me, was how, during a meeting with Shaukat Aziz, the then prime minister, Mai was forced to have an interpreter as she could not understand spoken Urdu, the language of government. Yet the National Education Policy 2009 wants to see English become the de facto language of instruction, while some experts have called for first languages alone to be taught at the primary school level. Functional literacy, however, does not necessarily pertain exclusively to the written word.

Nevertheless, however trite it may seem to say so, her struggle over the last nine years has not been in vain.

Mai’s decision to stay put and set up schools for local girls has served to challenge the stereotype of women as submissive custodians of man-made notions of honour.

Yet equal credit for this must go to her father who has supported her all the way, “unlike certain fathers, who would not hesitate to sacrifice their son or daughter to protect themselves.” In this tale of Pakistani patriarchal society at its worst, Mukhtaran Mai’s father saw his honour linked not to his daughter’s enforced disgrace but to pursuing justice for her.

This alone makes him stand out as a role model — a man truly sincere in championing the rights of women.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 29^th, 2011.