The Pakistan Academics’ Collective recently hosted an Oxford-NYU collaborative information session about ongoing  political violence, especially against women. The closed discussion was attended by a variety of female scholars, women based in Pakistan, and activists from different global justice and women’s rights organizations such as Codepink, MADRE, and World Without War, among others. 

Among the participants were senior scholars who have done extensive work on Pakistan, like Professors Riffat Hassan (University of Louisville), Tamara Sonn (Georgetown University), and Masooda Bano (Oxford University), * who shared their concerns and perspectives about how women’s political struggles and the violence they are facing are being addressed, articulated, and framed, especially for the Western press. There was an extended discussion about the women’s active role during the current crisis, where the state is trying to stamp out criticism of delayed elections and repeated military intervention in politics. Significant concerns were raised during the meeting about the ways in which the recent crackdown against female protestors and commentators was a setback for women’s political freedoms and active participation in the public sphere.

Prominent activists like Medea Benjamin from Codepink, Kathy Kelly from World Without War, Rev. Anne Weirich from the Presbyterian Church, Zeenat Adam, from the Afro-Middle East Centre in Johannesburg, South Africa, and JM Kirby from MADRE spoke out in solidarity with the struggles of women in Pakistan, and shared strategies from a comparative global perspective for effective organization against state brutality and violence. Participants of the meeting also acknowledged that the particular struggles of women against political persecution in Pakistan are part of broader and more general human rights’ abuses taking place against citizenry of all genders and strata at the moment.  

Scholars and commentators also engaged with women participants from Lahore, Peshawar, and Karachi heard disquieting stories from the ground of police misbehavior, arbitrary arrests and persecution. Stories reported by press outlets and by eye-witness observers were also shared. Some of these women, who had been arrested and sent to jail for simply protesting outside their homes, expressed a loss of hope in the current situation. Participants from Pakistan spoke of how the current police violence against Pakistan was being wreaked on both veiled and unveiled women, and that they were no neat divides of culturally Westernised vs non-Westernised among the women currently being arrested and put in jail for actions as minor as stepping outside their homes to protest against abuse of law and civil rights. They described the suffocatingly intolerant political atmosphere and everyday sense of fear among all critics of the regime in Pakistan right now. Dr. Riffat Hassan emphasized that she was deeply concerned about what was happening to women in Pakistan and said that the current crisis was “a test case for the West and Western feminists”.  Dr. Hassan described the women’s role in the current political moment as “a grassroots movement of confident progressive women coming from diverse backgrounds and all walks of life, who are fighting for their social and political freedoms”. “These are tens and thousands of women, who have never participated in any kind of political movement,  but are out on the streets now. They are not afraid of raising their voices in the public, they are willing to be beaten and they are even willing to die it seems. So why are we not seeing an outcry about the state violence against women in Pakistan, just like there was an instant outrage against what was happening to women in Afghanistan and Iran?  These are very important moral and political questions that need to be asked. We can raise them and let’s see what happens”, she said.

A number of scholars present discussed the extent to which the lack of reporting in the Western press of these emerging stories from Pakistan is attributable to prevalent Islamophobia, which creates obstacles in recognising Muslim women’s resistance and political struggles, unless they can be linked directly to familiar Western narratives. Some of the US based participants, noted that there is a general lack of awareness about this recent political violence against Pakistani women in countries such as the US and pointed out that they are hearing these stories for the first time. They also acknowledged the role of politics in the articulation of support for women. Medea Benjamin pointed out that if Pakistan was not an “ally” of the US and a “hostile state” like Iran, the US government and the Western media would be “obsessed with the story”.

All commentators voiced concerns about how the recent crackdown against female protestors and commentators seems to be narrowing the political space for women in Pakistan, and promoting an atmosphere of fear and gloom, as not only political women but also female relatives of men in politics become targets of state persecution. In a society used to an amount of cultural segregation and distance between the two genders, accounts of female protestors being subjected to manhandling and even sexual violence and humiliation are producing feelings of horror and trepidation. This has the unfortunate potential of serving as a deterrent to women’s political participation, in a context where female participation at political rallies and protests has been on the rise in big and small towns in Pakistan over the last few years. 

There was a general discussion about gender disparities and dynamics, which seemed to be a common ground for all participants. Commenting on this, Professor Sonn, who teaches Islamic history at Georgetown, remarked, “I never say women are equal to men. Men aspire to be equal to women. They are not there yet, they may get there someday, and maybe we need to show them the way.”

This session was planned as the first of many such conversations on this important subject, and we hope that future discussions will aim to engage with an even more diverse array of activists, lawyers, and journalists from Pakistan and around the world.   

 

*Names and identities of many participants withheld for privacy reasons.