Author: Sherry Rehman
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: June 9, 2003
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/archive_full_story.php?content_id=25419
Introduction: At stake is not just
women's rights, but Pakistan's future
Every time the spectre of a Shariat
act is raised in Pakistan, women are the first to shudder. Despite the
rush of burqa humour clogging the Net, these jokes conceal a fear as visceral
as it is real. Irrespective of its content, there are widespread fears
that the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) government's adoption of a
Shariat bill could result in serious curbs on women's mobility and freedom.
The first worry is that many radical clauses kept off this bill's agenda
will still be pursued by self-appointed vigilantes in the streets. A bigger
fear is that once legislation such as the Hisba act goes through in the
Frontier, the whole apparatus of vice and virtue policing may leak into
the public culture of other provinces as well.
Such fears are not unfounded. Our
own history, as well as the experience of other Islamicised states, holds
up a largely anti-women, deeply orthodox mirror to the societies they reflect.
This picture threatens a large mainstream of Pakistani women today. Unlike
the stereotype of the veiled, faceless woman the media likes to sensationalise,
a majority of Pakistani women work unveiled inside and outside the home
but remain unaccounted for, and hence unempowered, by the strictly fiscal
nature of the modern economy. As in the wider South Asian context, in Pakistan
too a woman's identity is a fragile social construct, subject to almost
daily negotiation with powerful economic, political and cultural forces.
What so-called Islamic laws will do is introduce a new slew of legal limits
and cultural constraints to restrict even more the public space that most
women can operate within.
I am not alone in dismissing the
old right-wing bromide, in currency again, that such laws seek to protect
women. Anyone who has witnessed the corrosive effects of General Zia's
Islamisation process that saddled Pakistan with laws such as the Hudood
and Zina ordinances knows what they mean for women.
If to privileged, postmodern apologists
such laws don't define the quotidian experience of the average woman, I'd
urge a quick, sobering look at police records of the last few years. The
Hudood ordinance remains the single most commonly applied law to hold women
in indefinite lock-up. According to this law, in present-day usage, when
a woman petitions against her rape she invariably becomes an accomplice
instead of a victim. Needless to say, the law's axe falls mostly on poor,
resource-starved women.
But my issue with this bill is not
just about the misogynist content and scope of these laws that seek to
Talibanise the country. Without a doubt, women's freedoms and hard-earned
rights are the first to go in any such project. Many others in Pakistan
also feel these laws don't just threaten the power and mobility of women
to attempt to live as equal members of the federation. They strike at the
very heart of the project that is Pakistan. I say this because the legislation
is about a fundamental re-ordering of the state in the image not of its
founding father's dream, but in the muddled vision of its first opponents,
our friends in the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal.
Mohammad Ali Jinnah would find most
of the 71 points that the Council of Islamic Ideology has recommended in
this Shariat bill repugnant to the spirit of tolerance and liberalism he
espoused in his vision of Pakistan. Conceived as a home for Muslims to
live in peace and prosperity, Jinnah had made it amply clear that Pakistan
was never to be a theocracy.
For over three decades, Shariat-law
adventurism has been a favourite ploy of rightist political forces who
have been allies with the military in dominating the national agenda through
the appropriation of the state's ideological discourse. Although critics
of such policies blame the insertion of the Objectives Resolution in the
Constitution as the original concession on this slippery slope, the real
Islamisation of the state began seriously only under Zia. His formula of
harnessing Islamist parties as a substitute for the legitimacy conferred
by real democracy continues even today.
General Musharraf's intransigence
on refusing the elected parliament the right to indemnify his constitutional
amendments has led him up the same dangerous road. For a self-proclaimed
secularist, his obsession with marginalising moderate, mainstream parties
at the expense of the stability of the new democratic set-up has exposed
his weakness and willingness to barter anything for his political survival.
Faced with a revolt in the National Assembly and Senate, where his potential
for an alliance with the MMA is crumbling in the wake of his refusal to
give up his COAS uniform while remaining president, he is locked on the
horns of a nasty dilemma.
The good news is that as surely
as night follows day, the NWFP's Shariat bill will be challenged as unconstitutional
by the bar councils, in the Supreme Court. Women's groups, minorities and
trade unions will back the PPP a hundred per cent on reversing this bill
on the grounds of it being a "Taliban bill". It is also not a foregone
conclusion that the federal government will let this bill be signed by
the governor of that province, although this tactic too will only buy its
opponents a little more time, given that the bill will eventually have
to be returned to the assembly.
At his own peril, Musharraf feels
he can ignore this. His gameplan is clear. To break the single-issue agenda
of the opposition on the Legal Framework Order crisis, he is dangling the
carrot of this bill in front of the MMA. The stick is the pressure from
his non-party local body councillors to resign their offices in confrontation
with the MMA assembly. What he can't manage forever is the game he is playing
with his real constituents, the terrorist-panicked US.
At the end of the day, nobody wants
to back a dictator who is losing control of the game. Or who has lost his
utility as a bulwark against religious militancy. The NWFP's Shariat bill
is not a pawn in the MMA's chess game with the general. It is their final
solution. It is high time the Jamali government alerted him to the reality
that there is no such thing as limited Islamisation. At stake is not just
his own survival. It is the survival of Pakistan as we know it.
(The writer is a member of the National
Assembly in Pakistan, and former editor of the newsmagazine 'The Herald')
