Here in this country, it is easy to tell when a little girl has been raped, murdered and cruelly discarded as if worth no more than unwanted trash. It is easy to tell because the men of Pakistan become angry.
Our news channels cover the crowds of men demanding #JusticeForZainab, the seven-year-old who was kidnapped from outside her house in Kasur earlier this week. Before allowing all the big chieftains — from the Chief Minister Punjab to the Army Chief to the Chief Justice LHC — to lip sync their profound grief as they read from the autocue that gets pulled up for each and every time a girl child’s life is cut short in such brutal a way. And always it is the same script that is followed. All these big chiefs order as if by magic that those responsible be hunted down and brought to justice immediately.
When the CM Punjab says, or in this case tweets, that those failing in their duties to arrest those responsible will face action — he doesn’t appear to understand that the buck stops with him. And as for the police, who by their own admission, are struggling to hunt down those behind 12 similar murders in the last two years, they decided to show how seriously they took Shehbaz Sharif’s words by killing at least two men from the protesting crowd.
And herein lies the rub. Pakistan is a country where crimes against women and girls only go punished when the big chiefs deem it so. When of course we all, and they too, know that what we need is not the flourish of a magic wand but the building and strengthening of institutions. As well as the recognition that Pakistan, like any other country, has a toxic substance abuse problem: the patriarchy. And that it is slowly but surely robbing this country of some 200 million of its vast potential.
So what therefore is to be done?
This is where the state, at all levels, would do well to invest in civil society. Naturally we are not talking of corporate sponsorship deals. But we do mean providing honest and sincere support to and working alongside with and taking the lead from civil society actors as well as those who have much research under their belt about how best to begin the long and arduous journey towards a gender sensitive society. This will be one hard slog; far more so than quibbling about which (imperialist) English language pronouns are the most inclusive of all binary and non-binary genders.
What Pakistan needs is a mainstreaming project of a different kind: mainstreaming of women into all spheres of society; both public and private. Meaning that we need to make public spaces here safe for all women — especially the hundreds of thousands who have no choice but to navigate these on a daily basis; without the luxury of documenting it on Instagram. But going beyond this, we need gendered interpretations by women themselves of both the law and religious edicts. For the former will only serve to strengthen the criminal justice system. And then we need to see about taking women all the way to the glass ceiling and beyond because she isn’t called Lady Justice for nothing. The latter, for its part, will strengthen the state against the religious right over the coming generations as will the normalising of women as religious scholars. This is not to overlook the intersectionality of non-Muslim and Muslim minority sect women.
After all, we are far too ready and willing to show off Pakistani women engaging in combat roles to defend this nation from enemies across our borders. But isn’t it about time that Pakistan defend its women from the enemy within. We certainly think so.
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