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RIGHTS-PAKISTAN: Women Push For Political Space In Patriarchy

Ashfaq Yusufzai

PESHAWAR, Mar 7 2008 (IPS) - Saeeda Anwar is a 38-year-old Pakistani schoolteacher. She works in a school here in the capital of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), but she is not allowed to exercise her franchise.

"My family is strictly against women voting. They don’t like us to vote. Although, I am allowed to work as a teacher because I give them all my salary," she says of the male members of her family.

Patriarchy is deeply embedded in the NWFP. The Pakistan government has neither been able to implement modernising programmes nor Article 34 of the Pakistan Constitution (1973) that says ‘steps shall be taken to ensure full participation of women in all spheres of national life’.

Here women are banned from participation and decision-making – a tribal feudalism almost as rigid as in adjacent Afghanistan under the Taliban. It is the men who decide who their women can talk to or whether they can go out of the house, also who their daughters should marry and when.

Yet, 15 women challenged political exclusion and contested the Feb. 18 polls to parliament and the national assembly from the NWFP. Not one won, and polling by women, both in the province and in the neighbouring Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), was once again the lowest in Pakistan.

Dr Simin Mehmud Jan, the Pakistan Muslim League’s (PML-Q) candidate for the assembly election from Peshawar city, blamed her defeat on "Pukhtunwali" (the code of Pakhtuns or Pashtuns who are the majority in northern Pakistan). "The NWFP and FATA are ingrained with Pukhtunwali, and not yet ready to accept a woman as their political representative," she told IPS.

But she was not about to give up hope. People will start accepting women as their political representatives by the time of the next general election, she said very optimistically, in an interview. A medical professional, she was a former member of the provincial assembly, nominated by her then ruling party.

The first woman elected to the National Assembly, Pakistan’s parliament, was Begum Nasim Wali Khan, wife of the late Awami National Party (ANP) leader, Khan Abdul Wali Khan, in 1977. She was elected an unprecedented four times.

Women won 15 of the 272 seats where direct elections were held last month, improving upon their tally of 13 in the last 2002 general election. There are 342 seats in parliament, but the Pakistani constitution reserves 10 seats for religious minorities and 60 seats for women, to be filled by proportional representation among parties with more than 5 percent of the vote.

"I am less known as compared to other candidates (male), perhaps that is the reason I lost," says Shazia Asif Baghi. "But I have not lost heart and will contest again." Baghi had hoped to win the votes of women, but very few made it to polling booths.

Ghaliba Khusheed, a former member of the provincial assembly who contested as an independent candidate from two constituencies in Peshawar, believes her crushing defeat was the result of "negative propaganda about women’s participation by male rivals".

"The major reason for this nondemocratic behavior is gender disparity due to tribal culture," comments Rakhshanda Naz, resident director of the Aurat Foundation, part of a civil society Alliance for Protection of Human Rights (APHR), which campaigned widely for the voting rights of women in the run-up to the polls.

"The reason for the dismal electoral performance may be many," observes Rabia Begum, a political scientist at the Univeristy of Peshawar. "That no woman won reveals the extent to which our society is conservative," she told IPS.

The alliance of civil society organisations has called for an investigation into the disenfranchisement of women. Women comprise 47 percent of the population of NWFP and FATA.

"We demand from the new government that they probe how women were disallowed from voting in Peshawar, Malakand, Dera Ismail Khan, Dir Lower, Swabi, Shangla, Kohistan, Batagram and Charsadda districts and in the tribal areas," said Aurat Foundation’s Naz speaking on behalf of the eight-member APHR.

Zahira Khattak, president of the ANP’s women’s wing, and Bushra Gohar, nominated to parliament by the ANP, said their party, which won the provincial elections edging out the ruling religious right coalition, would work towards bringing more women to the polling booth in the next election. In the 2002 polls, hardline candidates had signed an agreement to prevent women from voting.

The left-leaning ANP is poised to form the government in the NWFP with the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) of Benazir Bhutto, the assassinated former prime minister.

Meanwhile, Shazia Aurangzeb, the provincial secretary-general of ex-premier Nawaz Sharif’s party, Pakistan Muslim League, said empowerment of women was their one-point agenda.

"My party has very ambitious plans for women. We will introduce micro credit schemes for poor women. Once they get empowered they will learn that voting is their right," she told IPS. Women are back centre-stage in the politics of Pakistan’s patriarchal north.