Empowerment and power

Blessed with opportunities, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy – a talented and brave Pakistani woman – could have chosen other professions to excel. But her decision to highlight the plight of women in Pakistan reflects her passion and willingness to do something impactful vis-à-vis women rights.  Her documentaries on honour killing and the brutality against women in Pakistan have catapulted her to international fame as the only Pakistani to win two Oscars.

Presumably oblivious of what could go viral on social media, Sharmeen recently sent out a tweet reprimanding a doctor for sending a friend request to her sister on Facebook. This triggered a debate on social media about the ethics of a doctor sending a friend request on Facebook to one of his patients.

Sharmeen’s unusual angst on social media led to the termination of this doctor by hospital authorities under the pretext of breach of professional code of conduct. However, there was no official statement from the authorities of the said hospital on the sudden dismissal of the doctor. Sources from the hospital have told me that the step was taken because the doctor had violated the clause of confidentiality.

As per the clause, a doctor is not allowed to exploit his or her access to the personal data of a patient to develop personal relationships. The news of the doctor’s sacking invited the wrath of many on social media who believed it was an act of appeasement of a celebrity. Sharmeen insisted in her tweet that sending a friend request to her sister was tantamount to harassment.

Let us not go into the semantics of what harassment entails, The incident hints at a deep-rooted social issue that haunts our society today. There are three wrongs that have made the situation even more complicated: Sharmeen using social media as a means to express her disdain; a hasty decision by the hospital authorities to terminate a doctor; and the debate of misogyny and elitism which takes us nowhere.

This article is not an attempt to belittle the achievements of Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy. It is more about a deeply-held pathology of our society. The pathology of exploiting power and influence for self-aggrandisement invariably infects our society today. Empowered and liberated souls like Sharmeen must not be taken to task for what her action did to the doctor. Instead, the deeper issue of our social attitudes must always be questioned.  Through this social media campaign, Sharmeen might want to bring to the fore an important matter within our digital world that needs stringent legislation and requires strict enforcement, especially on issues of harassment.

Nonetheless, it also reflects how power and influence are perceived as an instrument of recognition in our society. I endorse what Aisha Sarwari has pointed out in her article in the Express Tribune on October 29 where she suggests that unsolicited friend requests without consent constitute harassment. But I disagree when she oversimplifies the whole debate against the firing of the doctor as misogyny and sexism. There is a serious flaw at the core of our borrowed notion of feminism that tends to perceive power as a man-centric phenomenon.

The bigger question is the emancipation of the weak – whether men or women – whose exploitation has material reasons beyond an arcane argument of feminism. Hypothetically speaking, if one fine morning all women become feudal lords, would that address the political and economic disempowerment of landless poor women of rural Pakistan? Would that be the end of the exploitation of women or men who live in abysmal wretchedness? Benazir Bhutto became the prime minster of Pakistan twice. But what transformation did it bring to the poor women of Larkana?

Harassment is a condemnable act in all its forms and manifestations and it happens in a situation of asymmetrical and unequal power relationships. In an unequal power relationship, the weaker is vulnerable to be harassed. Aisha Sarwari makes a valid point here when she asserts that the patient was the weaker part of this relationship. In a similar vein, we may argue that the doctor became vulnerable to an onslaught of a powerful celebrity. 

The dilemma of our borrowed feminism is that it tends to play down the politics of disempowerment as an intrigue of men. It stops short of providing a viable strategy to transform the sociopolitical relationship of the enslavement of the poor. The feminisation of poverty overshadows the whole logic of structural transformation. Intrinsic to this approach is a popular sense of positive discrimination and, hence, it gives credence to the worldview of conservatives who assert that men and women can never be equal. 

Some have said that the frivolity of Sharmeen’s tweet represents the dilemma of our society where power is exercised to prove the worthiness of a person’s social standing. The argument that the hospital did what was professionally appropriate also calls for revisiting the ethical foundations of professionalism. Professionalism is not an inert concept that is unaffected by our social reality. It is rooted in the evolution of our value system and the ethical precepts of being heard.

This is not to deny the fact that women are more vulnerable than men in a traditional society like ours. They face more exploitation at domestic and societal levels and they are the ones to bear the brunt of poverty. This also does not mean that all men are empowered and have the liberty to harass women. There must be a contextual understanding of how power exhibits itself in a situation.  

In our daily life, from mundane shopping trips to professional undertakings, we are told to exert power to get things done. The myth goes like this: if you want to get others to do your work, you must show that you are more powerful than others. 

We all have vantage points to look at poverty from an adventurist perspective without having experiential knowledge of its wretchedness.  What happened to Sharmeen’s Oscar subject – poor Rukhsana Bibi from the suburbs of Multan? The documentary that won acclaims for Sharmeen ended up being a cause of further victimisation for Rukhsana Bibi.  Rukhsana Bibi was cast as a key character in Sharmeen’s short documentary. Later, she was left to her own devices to deal with an aggrieved husband and a furious family and was expelled from her home for appearing in a film that brought dishonour to the family. 

Rukhsana Bibi is not only the victim of an acid attack but is also a victim of our elitist adventures of self-aggrandisement. In this society of ethical decadence, we all have some element of this syndrome to sell dreams to the poor and relish on their wretchedness as a means of business. The more we have celebrities, the less we are sensitive to the real issues of disempowerment and poverty.

The writer is a freelance columnist based in Islamabad.

Email: ahnihal@yahoo.com