Premeditated murders and power equations

“There is no honour in honour killing…”. These words bear special importance when coming from the prime minister of Pakistan. The PM echoed the words of millions of thoughtful Pakistanis.

The words were spoken at a gathering at the PM’s Secretariat for the premier of Academy award winner Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy’s documentary against honour killing, ‘A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness’. It was an encouraging occasion. The prime minister had hosted the event and was willing to take ownership of a campaign to end the premeditated murder – labelled offensively as ‘honour killing – of young women. He also quoted from the Holy Quran: “And for women are rights over men similar to those of men over women.” [2:228]

Off stage the prime minister was even more vocal about the need to end these premeditated murders, saying it has nothing to do with religion, it is only how society has decided to control women. The prime minister also said – as many around him patted him for ‘owning the cause’ – that such customs and practices have nothing to do with religion and that we must change peoples’ mindsets.

Many years ago when the 83-year-old icon of peoples’ development and the founder of the Orangi Pilot Project, Dr Akhtar Hameed Khan Sahib, had been maliciously charged with blasphemy, the prime minister had, behind closed doors, recalled the compassion of Prophet Mohammad (pbuh). The prime minister had at the time opted to not come out with his position publicly. Now on these premeditated murders he has. But the showing of Chinoy’s documentary, while a commendable move, was the easy part.

When we say: what next, Mr Prime Minister? – many old questions inevitably surface, yet again. How do you ensure that society gives up decadent and inhuman practices? An entire architecture of resistance alone can roll them back. The bold message that Obaid conveyed through her documentary was simple but convincing…unless strong deterrents against honour killings are put in place in Pakistan, this murder in the name of barbaric honour will never end.

Why? Simply because as Obaid’s documentary illustrates, murderers – including fathers, brothers or husbands – will have absolutely no problem being pardoned by the victim-survivor, the very person they tried to kill. This is the hierarchy of power flowing often from a combination of brute force and social customs; it perpetuates itself unchallenged in large stretches of society. In these stretches, according to Obaid, every year more than 1000 women are murdered in the name of ‘honour’. Such is the power of custom and tradition. No matter how ugly and anti-Islam this practice may be, unless the state inflicts a very heavy cost on the perpetrators of what are essentially premeditated murders, this crime will continue unchallenged.

Such evil practices remain alive in specific contexts. In Pakistan we are often hounded with deafening noises laced with outlooks that have yet to comprehend the pre-eminence of the sensitive and the compassionate soul, outlooks that have yet to tread the path towards the Ascent of Man, towards realising the human potential, the becoming of Ashraful Makhlooqaat – the best of His Creation. Instead a convoluted and contrived morality that seeks to perpetuate the dominance of sheer physical (brute) force reigns over vast stretches of our society. This dominance through brute force has ignored the lessons of the finer human aspects of sensitivity, justice, and compassion that all great religions and icons of goodness have attempted to inculcate.

But over the centuries, as we have seen, these lessons of justice and equity in dealing with men and women have not been easily absorbed by society unless an authoritative segment, one that directs the course of society, consciously decides to reform and re-engineer society on the principles that flow from these lessons. Significantly at the core of reforming society and promoting justice and equity, especially with respect to gender, is essentially a recalibration of the power equation. It is about altering the belief and practice of men’s control and dominance over women.

Multiple sources – ranging from Allah’s Message in the Holy Quran, to the legal frameworks in society, to the economic empowerment of women, feminist movements, women’s education etc – have inspired change, in varying degrees, towards greater gender equity in society. However, ultimately wherever the question of redistribution of power arises, resistance to this redistribution inevitably follows.

Even in kitchen politics, the (male) cook will resist any amount of power-sharing with the newly inducted maid. Hence gender equity, which spans across platforms, ranging from the family, to business, to education, to politics, seeks to redistribute power and authority. To ensure gender-based justice, within a finite context of decision-making if there must be equitable sharing of authority, some decision-making power must be re-allocated.

Defence of women’s oppression creates endless imaginary narratives. For example, we also hear repeatedly that talk of women’s rights is an obsession of the elite, westernised women. Such crass talk is the refuge of those who opt to remain ignorant of the millions of women in Pakistan that constitute the spinal cord of their households. Just take those who work as household help in the cities, the home-care nurses who look after our elderly. Their stories of violence and pain may not be new but every story carries a narrative of oppression and brute force.

A few months ago Zarina, armed with her four children ranging from 5 to 12 arrived from Jhang. Her husband, a drug addict, would hardly bring any earnings home and had made beating her and the children his favourite activity. Fed up, Zarina finally braved a journey to Islamabad. Now she works in three households, looks after her three children while having employed her twelve-year-old as a house-maid. All because there is nothing within Zarina’s social-familial context to force her drug-addict husband to tend to his obligations.

Those in authority need to construct architectures of deterrence against this never-ending oppression of women. For example, in early 2005 when the serving president of Harvard University and former treasury secretary under Bill Clinton, argued at a seminar that men outperformed women in sciences and maths because of biological differences, he was finally removed. What was the lesson from his dismissal: that people in positions of authority functioning within a context committed to gender equity must know that discriminatory words too carry a heavy price.

This is genuine deterrence. Not what we experience repeatedly in public spaces in Pakistan. Obaid’s powerful film documents the saga of an unknown but incredibly brave young girl who sought agency to fight back against her premeditated murder. But what were we able to do with the minister from Balochistan who some years back defended, in the name of tradition, the burying alive of women who went against tradition.

The control levers of our society, especially biased legislation and repressive customs, largely remain rigged to perpetuate oppressive male domination in very large spaces of society. This results in millions of our hardworking women being doomed to lives of pain and oppression.

Will Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s party take substantive steps to roll back these premeditated murders. Will they legislate against them – and soon? That is the million-dollar question…the rest is inconsequential.

The writer is a national security strategist, visiting faculty at NUST and fellow at Harvard University’s Asia Centre.

Email: nasimzehra@gmail.com

Twitter: @nasimzehra