Pakistan is class-based society and we treat people from working class with prejudice
KARACHI: Recently, three women tortured and murdered their 18-year-old domestic worker, Uzma, because she dared to help herself with a serving of food.
These women have been arrested and are currently under judicial remand. While I hope that justice is served to the teenager who died, would this serve to bring to an end vulnerabilities of the poor and the weak in the country?
Pakistan is a class-based society and we treat people from the working class, or who are widely known as the lower class, with prejudice. We consider them lowly, as if they are less worthy of being humans. We all have an identical attitude towards the working class.
While passing laws to protect the rights of domestic workers is important, this is not a solution to our age-old problem of the class divide.
We need to advocate for treating everyone as equals, not to differentiate in terms of class, creed or culture. We should see human being as human beings. This is what needs to be done as arresting people will do little to save our domestic workers from becoming another Tayyaba or Uzma.
Nusrat Aleem
Published in The Express Tribune, February 4th, 2019.
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