Aboard the Democracy Train (17 page)

Once at a Rotary Club function, I found myself the only female sitting across a table of men bunched together. As was the custom, a male guest speaker had delivered his keynote address
in English. The speakers at the event were supposedly liberal and enlightened; I found myself wondering why there were no women in the audience. Then, a man – comfortably ensconced between his male buddies – leaned over and asked the inevitable question: “How do you feel being the only woman here?”

How did I feel? I turned it into a joke. It was a question that occasionally infuriated me. I knew the men waited for me to go home but I had no intention of quitting. I loved traveling, meeting new people, writing and trying to influence public opinion. People knew me as the woman reporter from
Dawn
who accepted dangerous assignments with zest – ethnic and sectarian riots, terrorist incidents, bomb blasts and shoot-outs between drug mafias.

Indeed, I had developed such a reputation for covering risky events that once, when my colleagues covered a bomb blast in a crowded marketplace in Karachi and my name was not among the joint by-lines on the front page, my colleague jested that he had been worried that I was killed in the blasts.

The more conservative men couldn’t handle it, uncomfortably pretending that I didn’t exist. I saw the frustration mount in a male colleague who supported an Islamic party. Time and again, he saw me, a young woman, drive up in my car to cover the shoot-outs, bomb blasts and ethnic riots that rocked Karachi. He just couldn’t get over the fact that I seemed to be everywhere. Apparently, one day he just couldn’t take it anymore. To my amusement, he bellowed right in my face: “Doesn’t
Dawn
have any
men
left?”

Under Gen. Zia, the double standards ran deeper. Westernized elites paid lip service to Islam while retaining their privileged and often decadent lifestyles, drinking alcohol and attending wife-swapping clubs behind closed doors. That left the newly promulgated Islamic laws to reinforce customary practices that paralyze the weakest segments of society – namely poor, illiterate women.

Among the conservative rural communities, the customary laws were harsh enough to kill women for having sex outside marriage. Adding insult to injury, the Islamic law introduced in 1984 by Gen. Zia namely the “
Qisas
and
Diyat
” (Retribution and Blood Money) mandated that compensation for women victims of violence be fixed at half that of men. While honor killings trivialized the murders of women,
Qisas
and
Diyat
laws devalued their murders.

In 1992, a colleague tipped me, through police sources, about a harrowing story of a woman’s infidelity that she paid for with her life. Traveling to the outskirts of Karachi, I alighted at a typical Pashtun home in Pakhtoonabad, Mangophir, built atop hard barren rocks, where the wind blew dust for miles around. These were the kinds of homes that the Pashtun tribes – many of them fresh arrivals from Afghanistan – had built at barren hilly elevations in Karachi.

Inside the humble home, an elderly light-skinned Afghan, Sattar Mandokhel sat with bowed head on his
charpai
(a knotted bed) – his remorseful blue eyes, lost in thought. The 70-year-old Mandokhel had just killed his 16-year-old wife for sneaking off in the middle of the night to meet his son from a previous wife. His son had given her away and actually helped Mandokhel kill her.

The police had registered a murder case against the two men. Still, the old man seemed indifferent to the prospect of punishment. Instead, his blue eyes had a faraway look in them – perhaps lamenting the loss of the young woman he had acquired. Maybe he loved her and had killed her in a fit of jealousy. Already, the fact that the men were at home instead of in prison spoke volumes about the level of punishment that they would receive. Family members comforted Mandokhel, telling him that he had done the right thing.

“This is the treatment that a woman gets if she is disloyal to her husband. These are our customs,” an older woman in the household told me rather sternly. They saw me – a young woman scribbling on her notebook, suppressing her horror at the human tragedy that had unfolded.

There were hundreds of Pashtun-Afghan families like Mandokhel’s. They had migrated from Afghanistan to the
contiguous Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in Pakistan and practiced customary laws like honor killings, even when they lived in urban settings. These murders are not unique to Pashtuns but rather, it is a practice under which thousands of women have been killed in Pakistan’s tribal provinces for “dishonoring” the family.

In the wake of Islamization under Gen. Zia, society would become the larger prison for women. At family planning clinics, doctors told me that abortion was illegal under all circumstances. A clause in Gen. Zia’s infamous
Qisas
and
Diyat
Ordinance further deemed that women could be imprisoned for seven years for having an abortion. This came to a nation with an already rapidly growing population – one in which the average woman bears six children and has one of the highest fertility rates in the world.

With abortion illegal, poor women either resorted to infanticide or simply disappeared after the child was born. Pakistan’s veteran social worker, Abdus Sattar Edhi tried to clear the fallout from the anti-abortion laws by appealing against female infanticide. Edhi and his wife, Bilquis placed cribs in public hospitals where women victims of rape or those unable to get an abortion left their infants and disappeared. The veteran social worker placed the babies in orphanages, where if they were lucky they were adopted.

In this darkness, the only star that glimmered on the horizon appeared to be the young, politically ambitious Benazir Bhutto. It was a time when Gen. Zia had leaned heavily on clerics to issue
fatwas
(Islamic pronouncements) against women’s ability to rule. An Islamic advisor, Maulana Ansari suggested that Zia pass a law that no woman below 50 years of age could run for prime minister – and even then would need her husband’s permission. Women’s outcry stopped the proposal from reaching fruition but Benazir and her mother, Nusrat Bhutto were clearly on everyone’s minds.

I first met Benazir Bhutto in 1986 at the Karachi Press Club (KPC) – where she had come to meet members of the press. A bevy of journalists surrounded her as she was taken to the upper floor of the building. The former president of KPC, the late Mahmood Ali Asad thrust me through the crowd to introduce me as the “active lady reporter from
Dawn
.” Poised and dignified – a white silk
dupatta
around her hair – Benazir smiled graciously and made room next to her with the words: “Oh, I thought you were a school girl.”

I was seated next to her and I worked to take advantage of it. I asked Benazir if she would give me an interview for
Dawn
on the Islamic fundamentalist laws relating to women. The Zina Ordinances had by then forced women to disappear from public spaces. As a woman who campaigned for the public post of prime minister, Benazir’s position on the Islamist laws had not been publicized and I hoped to be able to do just that.

Benazir looked hard at me, indicating that she was weighing up the benefit of giving me an interview that would strike against the ruling Gen. Zia. In characteristic fashion, she threw me a counter question: “Can you write a paper detailing the laws that have been passed under Gen. Zia and their implications for women?”

The counter-offer took me by surprise. And yet, living with the effects of the discriminatory laws every day, I was happy to further her understanding of them. We parted with a common understanding that I would write a paper on the situation and she would give me an exclusive interview on the subject.

For the next several weeks I researched the Islamist laws at a little library in Karachi, set up by an academically-oriented women’s organization called Shirkat Gah. It was the forerunner to the activist Women’s Action Forum and War Against Rape – civil society organizations from a privileged class, which took enormous risks to protect the most vulnerable sections of society.

I had the document delivered to Benazir and received word from her party members that it was a “well researched piece.” Still, three months went by and there was no word from the woman who went on to become prime minister.

Finally, out of the blue I got a phone call from 70 Clifton, Benazir’s ancestral mansion in Karachi, saying that she wanted to see me. Armed with a tape recorder, I sped to her residence, ready to interview her. To my surprise, a handful of women activists were already there. Benazir had invited them to consult whether she should give me the interview.

It was 1986 and Benazir was still unmarried. That was apparently the stumbling block for the 33-year-old woman, who – notwithstanding her Western education – had roots in Larkana’s feudal culture. “What will the Mullahs think about me, a single woman…talking about issues such as rape?” she quizzed us frankly.

I was perplexed. As privileged women, we knew that the Islamist laws were implemented in the harshest possible way on poor women. But I wondered if Benazir had thought about the irony of becoming the prime minister of a country where discriminatory laws would still treat her as a second-class citizen.

The Western-educated women – mostly from the Women’s Action Forum – had long waited for the opportunity to turn around the situation for women. Knowing that Benazir stood a good chance of becoming Pakistan’s first woman prime minister, they convinced her that the time was right for her to pledge her support for women’s rights.

Apparently, our presence prevailed on Benazir. The next day, I got an urgent message from 70 Clifton that Benazir wanted to see me right away. Once again, I sped in my purple, soap-shaped car to her ancestral home. Benazir didn’t need to be asked any questions. Instead, in an unstoppable monologue, she regurgitated the points I had provided in my paper.

The following day, July 11, 1986,
Dawn
published my 45-minute interview with the headline, “Benazir Decries Laws and Attitudes that Degrade Women.” Benazir had praised her late father, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto for his role in the advancement of women’s rights. Most importantly, she made a commitment that if elected as prime minister she would repeal the discriminatory laws passed by Gen. Zia ul Haq.

My forays into interior Sindh – where nothing has moved for centuries – made me increasingly pessimistic that Benazir could effect change for women. Westerners can best understand the slow pace of life in traditional, rural Sindh as a throwback to thirteenth-century Christian Byzantine Europe, where women were veiled, house-bound and essentially considered as the property of men.

Living in the West, I was often asked how a woman from the traditional Muslim society could rise to become prime minister. The simple answer is that to the masses Benazir was the daughter of the populist Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, whose execution had transformed her into an “avenging angel.” Also, as a woman from a privileged background, she skillfully used her connections inside and overseas to maneuver her place to the top.

Otherwise, the dark realities for rural women are even hidden from the nation’s elite. In 1991, a male colleague and I headed to a small town in interior Sindh, where the peasants and low-income traders were spiritual disciples of feudals in Benazir’s cabinet. We were escorted by guards through a magnificent fortress with high walls and cemented pathways, which wove into a labyrinth. My male colleague and I were taken into a grand drawing room with fine carpets and engraved tables.

The feudal lord greeted me pleasantly – the “honorary male” from a prominent newspaper. Afterwards, when we finished a frank, at times “off the record” type of conversation, he suggested I visit the women’s quarters. Politely, I rose and was escorted by the servant to the women folk. My colleague stayed back; he was after all a
Na Mehram
– a man unrelated by blood to the women.

I walked through a maze that led up to the women’s quarters. Wearing loosely draped
chador
(a type of veil), the women here lived in an age reminiscent of sixteenth-century Moghul India. Never exposed to the outside world, they did not have a lot to talk about. We exchanged pleasantries; I explained that I had come from Karachi to do a story. They did not know what it meant to be a journalist, nor did career prospects seem interesting to them.

When these women from feudal families went outdoors, they donned black veils with tiny holes for their eyes. Even so, it was the feudal lord who determined the liberties that the women of his family could avail; they were required to travel in chauffer-driven cars with black drapes, dress modestly at all times and under no circumstances speak to men outside the family.

I spent a night at this
haveli
(feudal home) living as the women did, with days and nights of solitude. At night, uniformed guards patrolled their ancient fortress. My ears picked up the changing of guards in the dead silence of the night. “
Allah Sain Khair
” (by God’s grace), “
Maula Sain Khair
” (all is safe).

I left the fortress and continued traveling across interior Sindh. My freedom was in stark contrast to the lives of these women – creatures starved even of simple sensory impulses. The time I spent reporting in Sindh would inform me of the importance of the veil. By a process of osmosis, girls grew up to believe that their path to fulfillment lay in marriage and children.

In 1993, I attended a wedding in a small town in interior Sindh. It was a private event but my journalist’s eye took mental snapshots. Women arrived in carefully designed, expensive
shalwar kameez
and
dupattas
, with matching jewelry and make-up – all designed to show their standing in the feudal hierarchy. Chaperoned by male relatives and wearing black veils, the women showed their faces only after they were exclusively surrounded by their own sex. Outside, volunteers stood guard to stop any peeping toms.