Living Privately: Dying Publicly

Criminal offences are not ‘personal’; they are by definition ‘public’. There is nothing ‘private’ about abuse, murder.

More than two decades ago, Amartya Sen wrote a piece titled “More than 100 million women are missing”; an exquisite piece which deserves to be re-read. Yet, Farzana Parveen was not missing. Precisely, the opposite, Farzana Parveen was too visible. She is missing now, gone forever. She was murdered on one of the busiest daytime streets of Lahore outside the High Court gate (just yards away from my own office). The outrage, horror and anger is completely justified. Many are perplexed at why the police officers deployed outside the High Court did not act? Why not one of the many lawyers swarming the road acted to prevent this very, very public murder? Then there are fundamental questions of what twisted ideologies and customs lead people to kill their own sisters and daughters? What sort of a state and society allows it? Our society is misogynistic and chauvinistic, and has been so for some time now. This is just a sad, cold reality.

However, the answer to all the questions above has a common thread. We have a state and a legal system which allows impunity to commit violence against women. The criminal justice system in Pakistan is privatised, i.e., it treats many grave and heinous offences as personal matters, which can be resolved by the parties themselves. As opposed to the almost universal view of treating criminal acts as an offence against the state itself. Under Qisas and Diyat laws and the Criminal Procedure Code, murder is an offence against the family of the victim and they can forgive the murderer if they choose. It becomes a perverse joke when both the murdered and the murderers are from the same family, as is inevitably the case in the nauseatingly phrased practice of ‘honour killing’, as the decision to kill is often made at the family level, by the male patriarch. One is made acutely aware of how deep the rot is by the discovery that Farzana’s husband had strangled his first wife and used precisely the same laws to get away; which the killers of his second wife will use in the near future.

These laws, in general, tilt the field in favour of the powerful, the affluent. In particular, the state has essentially declared that matters involving women, what a family chooses to do with women in that family, are ‘private’ in nature. They remain ‘private’ even when the family decides to murder a young daughter. The state has indeed provided the enabling environment. Let us now revisit the question of why the police did not step in to prevent Farzana’s killing or even apprehend the killers immediately. Or the lawyers who stood by? The answer is simple and horrifying. Since it was a woman who was being beaten, never mind to death, it was assumed to be ‘personal’, to be ‘private’. In Pakistan, one does not interfere with what someone else does to their womenfolks, courtesy demands that we let ‘family matters’ be, even murders on public avenues. Make no mistake about it, there is no disconnect between how the law/state treats Farzanas who are murdered daily and how the police and lawyers treated the Farzana who was bludgeoned to death. Anything involving women is ‘private’, be it domestic violence, marital rape or just plain murder. This did not happen in ‘deepest darkest’ Sindh or the frontiers of ‘tribal’ Waziristan. This happened in ‘Pakistan proper’. At the seat of power; in the kingdom of the Metro Bus; in the land of the underpasses.

Disabuse yourself of the notion that it is only the ‘rural’, the ‘illiterate’ who do this. There are enough case studies to establish that ‘we’ the people, the lot of us do it and can do it with impunity. If the question is put directly to many conscientious citizens whether they consider women as ‘property’, they will be outraged (at least one hopes so). Yet, viewing oppression as ‘private’ is exactly that position. It is also the stated position of the Pakistani State. To reflect on who constitutes the ‘woh’ in Ali Aftab Saeed’s beautiful rendition of Kishwar Naheed’s “Woh jo bachion say bhee dar gay” is uncomfortable; it is not only the Taliban.



The prime minister has taken notice, as he should have, and ordered that the law be applied. Mr Prime Minister, the law here is part of the problem, not the solution. One can be finicky and point to the ‘Fasad-fil-Arz’ provision in the Penal Code, etc., empowering the court to punish the perpetrators (with a lesser sentence) even when forgiven, given the offence is ‘heinous’ enough. Well, one is yet to witness a pleasant murder. Yet, none of this is the point. The state views women as being ‘personal’ and enables society to do the same. The woman’s place is at home, and that, too, till the ‘family’ wishes it to be and then she has no place, barring perhaps, the few square feet in the graveyard (which, by the way, are too ‘public’ for most women while alive). Perhaps, it is really the grave, the odd tombstone which marks the territory of the ordinary woman in ‘public’.

There are many women who transcend this, however, Shaheed Benazir Bhutto, Asma Jahangir and Sherry Rehman do this by fighting and overpowering both the society and the state, and that requires phenomenal courage.

The problem with moral outrage is that it is immediate, case to case and limited to the most egregious of examples. For it to matter at all, it has to be directed at the state apparatus which allows these examples to happen. The dispensation of criminal justice cannot be privatised. Criminal offences are not ‘personal’; they are by definition ‘public’. There is nothing ‘private’ about abuse or murder. Let’s have the national conversation on these laws, which allow the state to be a bystander. If the prime minister really wants to provide justice to Farzana, he has to attempt to dismantle the system, which has future Farzanas lined up to be killed. A parliamentary commission to review and amend these laws can and should be formed. The state can act by bringing more women in ‘public’ affairs. It is long overdue that we have the first woman Supreme Court judge. The federal cabinet does not have to be an (almost) boys’ club. Neither the state nor those outraged can wait for our societal misogynistic impulses or traditions to fade away; they have to be actively and institutionally curtailed.

Post script: Farzana Parveen is dead for being a woman, Dr Mehdi Ali is dead for being an Ahmadi, many others for being Shia. Lateef Jauhar is still alive, yet publicly fading away due to his hunger strike, with the state as a bystander. Do not save your outrage till later, there might still be time in his case.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 1^st, 2014.

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