Feminism under clouds of war

Amidst concerns of war and cross-border conflict between India and Pakistan, feminist academics and activists from both countries came together for a conference organized by the Center for Excellence in Gender Studies at Islamabad’s Quaid-e-Azam University (QAU). Titled “Gender Knowledge in Pakistan: Production, Dissemination, and Contestation”, the conference took place over three days from September 28-30 while Pakistani and Indian troops exchanged fire across the Line of Control (LoC) and their respective media disseminated vastly different narratives about the conflict in both countries. It was in this context that the conference participants made it clear, to quote Prof. Nivedita Menon, that “feminism is bigger than the state, it cannot be contained by borders.” Coming together to discuss gender and other forms of equality and critique institutionalized repression, when Pakistan and India’s governments were threatening war, became a statement in itself. 

Menon, who teaches at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, travelled to Islamabad in an atmosphere of uncertainty and hostility between the governments of Pakistan and India. She was joined by anti-caste and transgender activist Gee Semmalar from Bengaluru and English professor Neloufer de Mel from the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. Conversations at the conference took on socially authorized misogyny, state-sanctioned gender violence and discrimination, and the struggle for queer and trans rights. The conference highlighted how feminist spaces are not often looked at as sites of power, but despite border tensions, it is these spaces that disrupt conflict narratives and foster ideas about equality, dissent, and cooperation.

Pakistan is not widely associated with progressive thought, given its representation in the global media as a country beset by gender-based violence and growing conservatism. Earlier this year, the killing of Qandeel Baloch, a social media celebrity and growing feminist icon, shocked many in the country. While her brother is being tried for the murder in what has been termed an honour killing, her parents have also accused a prominent member of the clergy who Baloch had famously exposed as being a hypocritical religious figure. Most recently, a television commercial from DYOT (Do Your Own Thing) clothing brand, featured women dancing in Lahore’s famous Anarkali market and was taken off air because the performers were bullied and threatened online and conservative elements termed the advertisement indecent. However, groups such as Girls at Dhabas, an activist movement aimed at reclaiming male-dominated public spaces for women, continue to make their voices heard and challenge gender discrimination in the country. 

Given this background, the audience understandably focused on how women’s rights in Pakistan compare to India and how feminism could assist women in dealing with everyday harassment. “How can we deal with harassment faced by women in cyberspace?” asked a woman in the front row. “It’s hard to talk about issues of gender and sexuality openly. How can we have these conversations?” asked another. Often, these questions kept in mind the lower position of Pakistan and India on development indices, always assuming that these issues were not as magnified across the border. However, Menon and Semmalar, who addressed most India-Pakistan comparative questions, were careful to point out the reasons for these disparities and the fallacies inherent in development rhetoric and measurement. 

“I think people are increasingly aware that spaces are shrinking, especially secular spaces,” says Prof. Farzana Bari who was one of the organizer’s. “Younger women now, particularly from the upper middle class or educated elite, are claiming a feminist initiative so I think we’re [Pakistani women] beginning to claim our feminist credentials.” However, Bari added that there remains a strong resistance to feminist ideas: “But then you will see others who ask why we need feminism if Islam gives equality.” Indeed, opposition to women taking up any sort of public space and the shaming of women in prominent positions has been an issue in Pakistan.

And yet, for three days, women, and some men, curious and interested in an alternative way of thinking and being in the world, asked questions and shared stories about gender, sexuality, and the difficulties they face in Pakistan. Arifa Khalid, a minister from the National Assembly, was moved enough by proceedings to share a story of gender discrimination she witnessed at the Punjab Assembly. A female parliamentarian “dropped something from her bag and rumours spread that it was a condom,” she said, adding that the minister was then shamed by other parliamentarians and in the media. Khalid also mentioned that women do not get credit for the work that they do and continue to be unwelcome in the old boy’s club of politics. But she ended her impromptu address by saying that “female politicians are in any movement with you.”

None of these messages interested the television media, who only wanted to follow senate chairman Raza Rabbani to and from the conference hall. Rabbani had been invited as the chief guest on the first day and largely blamed gender discrimination on failures to implement constitutional rights, while ignoring substantive discussions on the marginalization of women by the state. Then, in the middle of Nivedita Menon’s conference paper, Rabbani made an early exit. He was followed out by television media reporters who made so much noise packing up cameras and microphones that Menon had to stop speaking and wait for them to clear the room. The irony of disrupting a conference on feminism to give importance to a male politician was clearly lost on them. 

Human rights activist Asma Jehangir spoke of the many challenges facing women in Pakistan. She critically evaluated the legal system’s effectiveness in implanting laws that protect women and argued that it was a “dynamic and committed women’s movement” that stopped Pakistan from taking the same route as the Taliban. And when addressing the Nawaz Sharif’s government’s new pro-women credentials, Jehangir said they are merely “counting women’s votes”. During a different term in office, the same government called “honour killings a part of our culture.”

“One of the people who studies at Quaid-e-Azam told me how she has seen a picture of this university, students, teachers of the 70s,” says Nivedita Menon. “She told me about the men and women and the body language and the openness in that picture and how that has changed is dramatic.” These images of Pakistan’s past have become increasingly circulated within the Pakistani English media as a way of highlighting the growing conservatism in Pakistani society. However, such imagery also evokes a problematic idea of a pristine era in Muslim countries before the onset of conservative politics and the politicization of Islam. “One cannot run away from the fact that if the public space in Pakistan is shrinking it is because of the Islamic right,” says Menon. “The relatively greater openness of public spaces for women in India has to do with the fact that the religious right has been challenged.” In Pakistan, this challenge is currently underway. 

The religious right might have grown numerically and its street power has certainly become something of a concern, but at the same time, grassroots women’s movements both in lower class communities and amongst the urban middle class (perhaps not always articulated as ‘feminist’) have begun to take shape - the case of Mukhtar Mai who, after being gang raped on the orders of a village council, defied the odds and the authorities by becoming a vocal advocate for women’s rights and awareness on gender violence. While awareness of women’s issues is not new in South Asia, the systematic dismantling of the left in Pakistan by successive military regimes greatly erased progressive discourse and dissent. A feminist conference discussing critical theory and social engagement at a university such as Quaid-e-Azam, where students from the middle and lower middle class, as well as across all ethnic groups, are perhaps the norm, is therefore a sizable intervention in a country that is internationally considered to be casually surrendering to intolerance and oppression. Progressive politics and movements are not absent in Pakistan, and while the space for critical thought might be closing, there are challenges to both neoliberal and Islamist frameworks emerging within the country.