Structural malady and violence against women

Despite marginal improvements in gender-specific legislation in Pakistan, violence against women hasn’t declined during the last few years. The demeaning and dehumanising incident in DI Khan where a teenage girl was paraded naked in the streets by nine men for honour-based revenge should serve as a moment of reflection on how low we have sunk. Last week, a man in Tank district doused his wife in petrol and burnt her alive. Such incidents, not rare in rural areas of Pakistan, raise questions about inability of the state apparatus that fails to protect women’s right to life and dignity. The problem is not the missing might of the state apparatus but a deeper structural malady in the body of the state and society.

Every short-term, quick-fix and tried and tested solutions, suo motus, politicians and rights activists’ solidarity with the victims and condemnations will never prevent recurrence of the incidents mentioned above. After the initial response, once diagnosis of the malady begins, we shift the blame to the unjust informal justice mechanism that reinforces patriarchy or the dead slow nature of the formal justice system that fails to generate credible deterrence against rights and further entrenches the vulnerability of the meek and mild. The initial responses to bring perpetrators to justice, though right and much needed, yet insufficient, gloss over the more complex structural injustice that serves as effective medium or enabling environment for individual actions that trump justice.

Structural injustices manifest itself in the form of unequal institutional arrangement that further perpetuates marginalisation of certain groups, biased and distorted narratives, social norms, and discourses that produces and reproduces unfruitful outcomes particularly in the case of violence against women. However, some of them particularly the lack of gender-and rights-based socio-political, and the triangular alliance between patriarchy, ignorance and a conservative religious establishment and its subsequent influence on denial of social space to women merit serious consideration.

The politics of individual rights except Bhutto’s lip-serviced ‘roti, kapra aur makaan’ has never been the case in Pakistan. From Zia’s Islamisation to Musharraf’s so-called ‘enlightened moderation’ or Benazir’s and Nawaz Sharif’s struggle for ‘democracy’, rights-based discourse never surfaced as priority in political decisions. When democracy’s intrinsic values are forgotten and it is used as a tool of ‘best revenge’ or when slogans of ‘change’ are lust for power rather than structural reforms, rights-based discourse rarely shapes the political agenda. The mantra of ‘strengthening democracy’ and ‘change’ turns into crap when life, dignity and property of citizens are not protected. The obsession of political establishment with strengthening democracy is misplaced; it is not the looted money deposited in Swiss banks and off-shore companies or the hunger for power that threatens democracy, but the looted, robbed and nakedly paraded honour of ordinary Pakistanis that questions the essence of our democracy. It is the oppression of the poor at the hands of rotten governance system that perpetuates structural injustices which threatens democracy and equal opportunities.

The triangular alliance between patriarchy, ignorance and a conservative religious establishment has so far precluded any rights-based meaningful discourse in Pakistan. While the alliance defines woman as repository of man’s honour, it has kept her out of educational institutions, economic activities and political decision-making. If the alliance values women’s submission and sacrifice as a sign of good character, it is bound to choke freewill even if that concerns women’s own lives. The lack of rights-based socio-political discourse denies any improvement in women’s social space or effective agency for lifting them out of their predicament. The denial of social space in the traditionally male crafted — police, politics, market, mosque and court in the current settings reinforce such a predicament.

In a quest to fast-track progress of exit from this predicament, one needs to focus our attention on education. It is education that can break the alliance of patriarchy and a conservative religious establishment that has so far hold sway over definition of women’s rights and the subsequent social space accorded to them. Rather than squandering millions on talking-shop seminars and conferences, a moderate investment in the form of affirmative action and a robust parliamentary oversight to fast-track women’s access to quality education, should be made. In this regard one institution, the Women Parliamentary Caucus on the premises of the National Assembly, can play a phenomenal role by forging alliances against the nexus of patriarchy and ignorance. Women inside Parliament have to take a lead role in design and oversight of the affirmative actions to promote women’s education and subsequent empowerment. An increased spending on education with special emphasis on promoting rights-based discourse should be accompanied by meaningful employment opportunities. Economically poor voices rarely achieve tangible outcomes no matter how loud and how shriek they may be.

Reflecting on the injustices meted out to women, the state should demonstrate its relevance not in terms of just punishing the perpetrators but eliminate the conditions that make man and woman the enemy of each other. No one sounds more relevant than Thomas Paine who famously remarked that “Man is not the enemy of man but through the medium of a false system of government. ...instead of seeking to reform the individual, the wisdom of a nation should apply itself to reform the system.”

Published in The Express Tribune, November 28^th, 2017.

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