The number game

If empirical evidence were an exclusively reliable and accurate tool for analysis, Pakistan’s ranking on some global indicators would make for depressing and yet, contradictorily, promising prognosis at the same time. According to the World Economic Forum, Pakistan is ranked second last on its 2014 Global Gender Gap Report (141^st out of 142 countries, followed only by Yemen). It ranks 132nd in empowerment terms of education attainment, 119th for health and survival, and 85th for political empowerment.

The high ranking for the last category is purely because of the Local Government Ordinance (LGO) 2001 and the premium it awarded to women’s reserved seats in national, provincial, and local electoral tiers.

Very often, these numerical rankings may be accurate but misleading. Mathematical formulae do not explain the disconnect between numbers and outcome. By all accounts, practically all women parliamentarians have remained incredibly active in the previous, but even in the current 14^th National Assembly.

Women in provincial assemblies have proactively legislated on women’s issues, including some critically important laws such as, the Sindh Assembly’s Domestic Violence and Child Restraint Acts and the Punjab Assembly’s Muslim Family Laws Amendment and Family Courts Act (covering alimony and dower).

The usual cry is that these laws have no tangible value since they do not translate into rights, nor do they effectively trickle down to community levels. That’s a different debate. But more relevant to the argument about measuring women’s progress is that while relevant, the number of women legislators and the pro-women laws passed do not account for the struggle and competitiveness waged by women and the underclasses and the manner in which these alter the personal and political landscapes in their wake. How does one value, measure and grade struggle? The point is that students and observers should not be misled by the number game.

Quotas -- affirmative or negative?

The false expectations hinged onto affirmative action policies, such as women’s quotas, have always been debated by women’s rights activists. They have argued over whether women’s political representation should be autonomous (for example, organised in the form of an independent women’s political party), or integrated within mainstream representative parties.

Critical or socialist feminists have argued that between the structural obstacles of patriarchy, a nepotistic political culture and elite class capture, there should be little expectation regarding women’s empowerment or progress within male-dominated democratic representative politics. Also, given the restrictive political party structures and masculinist capture that drives the internal functioning of Pakistan’s political parties, the chances of growth, maturity or horizontal graduation into leadership positions from the Women’s Wings into the centralised hierarchies of these parties, are going to remain pipe-dreams.

The question remains then, is women’s entry into representative politics under the current system going to remain simply symbolic and a nonstarter for women’s socio-economic and legal progress, according to any index?

The recent refusal by the current government to release development funds to women parliamentarians (60 out of 69 National Assembly members are currently on reserved seats) has led to protests from women MNAs, but such a blatant undercutting of their moral and financial authority has not created the kind of outrage and backlash that it warranted.

Contradictions of women’s quotas

Unfortunately, quotas have been misunderstood in our political culture as tokenism or at best, an administrative formula merely to be fulfilled. Instead, the purpose of affirmative action is corrective -- a temporary remedy to bypass historical discrimination but always with the purpose of ultimately equalising participation.

So, after some levelling is achieved, there is a need to review the quota system so as to prevent stagnation and try and mainstream the effort to gain equal citizenry on every level.  Quotas and separate spaces for women to organise themselves, no matter how wrapped up they are in historical or ‘cultural’ explanations such as, the continuance of Women’s Wings, will have limited and contradictory effects.

It also makes no sense to lump all the women of a party together -- unless the ideology of the party (such as the Jamaat-e-Islami) firmly adheres to a policy of permanent personal and public separation of women as a separate class or entity in every sphere of life. On the other end of the political spectrum, the ANP’s integrationist ideology has meant they have no separate Women’s Wing.

Read also: The glass ceiling? 

All the various studies on the women councillors from 2002 onward confirm that women are not a homogenous group, and have varied interests and are differentially impacted by forces of gender, class, ethnicity, linguistic, kinship and tribal ties. Their political visions need to respond to their contextual realities and to common denominators of women’s interests.

For a women’s representative politics to thrive in the country, the women’s movement needs to engage more critically, not just with women councillors but to merge feminist ideology into mainstream politics. The movement needs to draw into its fold women from and, in turn, feed feminist consciousness into all group compositions. This is where the suggestion of a women’s political party takes genesis.

Agency is not an easily quantifiable matter, therefore, no single set of indicators truly capture empowerment. Even GEM (Gender Equality Measurement) is based on women’s numbers in formal institutions of positions of authority and is biased in its assessment of women’s influence over others rather than their own lives.

Women’s surge in public life

Within Pakistan, and without a recent census therefore, arguably, every indicator points towards an outstanding surge in women’s advancement into the public realm and a variety of fields and occupations. Let’s be clear that this has not been due to the largesse of the state or any government but despite their indifference towards women’s equality.

Women as actors and in their individual and, sometimes, collective capacity continue to create spaces for their entry into public space to reclaim some power in homes and communities, express their skills in any meaningful way and, sometimes, are just motivated by the desperate need to survive.

There are some who argue that formal democracy and its ideology of freedom, equality, and classlessness is, in fact, one of the most effective mechanisms in sustaining and reproducing class relations. It is accurate to argue that a resocialisation of democracy is necessary because formal political rights or the passing of legislation cannot replace social rights and neither does it guarantee accountability. But I propose, this is a male view. Women and the marginalised classes do not receive or reject (anything, but particularly), "democracy" in the linear way proposed by its male critics.

From the perspective of the marginalised and women, participation and inclusion within democratic processes and structures empowers, challenges and changes the process along the way. Rather than a blanket dismissal, what is needed is closer examination of some of the more grounded and smaller opportunities and achievements towards the larger goal of transformative politics -- particularly for women and minorities who do not receive the fruits or ‘dangers’ of democracy in the way that elite powers perceive, enjoy or are threatened by these.

What is needed is a class-based differentiation between grand democracy -- as symbolised through reservation policies and Women’s Wings kind of approaches -- against the more subtle expressions by women’s participation in every day politics. It would mean not looking for the ‘exalted’ MNA or MPA but the woman councillor who disrupts normative, male-defined, theocratically-maintained routine lives in communities.

And there have been many, many examples of politicised women seeking funds, fighting nazims, assisting in local development and in recourse for domestic abuse of women and children. How do we feminise politics at these levels and deter its capture by patriarchal interest groups?

A party of one’s own

One idea that has recently resurged across women’s rights groups is the idea of a women’s political party. There is no space here to revisit some of the historical debates on this proposal but if we recognise the difference in terms of the recent expression of women’s political agency qua women, then we may not dismiss the notion quite so quickly.

Recall the difference from a decade ago, when women of Dir were successfully denied their votes (2005) and today, when the women of Wari tehsil in Upper Dir are challenging the UC polling officers for not allowing them to cast their votes and faxing petitions to the EC to take notice of this violation.

There is a need to pay attention to the politicisation of Hazara women who are taking to the streets to protest the genocidal attacks on their communities. There are women who are frustrated by male tribunal justice regimes and are simply taking over dispute resolution positions in Balochistan and KP. The mothers of the murdered children of APS, Peshawar and the sisters of the disappeared of Balochistan are travelling beyond their homes and provincial borders to seek justice.

There are women in Swat who want to regain the losses suffered in education and entrepreneurship under the Taliban regime. And, one of the most critical signifiers to my mind, of the genuine potential of women’s political agency is how they are being targeted as viable political threats and therefore, being killed for their politics.

This ranges from Zille Huma, Benazir Bhutto, Parveen Rehman, Zara Shahid Hussain, Sabeen Mahmud and a whole range of unnamed women and girls who have dared to wage localised politics by defying community codes (and often paid the price with their lives) by way of going to school, joining NGOs, challenging university authorities, resisting terrorists, voting, standing for elections and take rapists and violators to court.

A multi-pronged and cross-sectional matrix of women’s political knowledge-bases and acts of citizenry need to be mapped and organised politically. The women’s movements of Pakistan need to rethink their own traditional approach of organising representative politics through NGO and donor-funded initiatives. These approaches all belong within the limitations of existing structures in the democracy project. The women’s movement also needs to rethink the gains and limitations of inclusion in male-defined political parties.

Instead, it may be time to look closer at the opportunities that may be seized and yanked from otherwise unyielding and class-locked democratic structures. Such a project that focuses on women’s current political activism across the country and across class, ethnicity and provinces and which attempts to bring together on one platform, their active and participatory citizenship into the shape of a Women’s Party, may at least provide a forum for a rethinking of what women’s representative politics should mean and what it could translate into.