PEOPLE love to say that Pakistan is a terrible place for women. I partially disagree. It’s obvious that this country is infinitely respectful, unflinchingly tolerant, and even borderline reverent, towards one group of women in particular. Dead ones.

Consider one of the foremost women lea­ders in Pakistani history: in 1964, Fatima Jinnah was leading a popular movement against a ruling dictator. Millions lined up to hear her speak as her train, ‘the Freedom Special’ crawled through East Pakistan. The presidential election of ’65 was around the corner, and Ms Jinnah seemed poised to make history.

Ayub Khan responded by labelling her a ‘ghadaar’. The irony was lost on an autocrat declaring the Quaid’s sister a traitor to the country she helped create, simply because she had the courage to stand up to him. Time magazine described Gen Ayub’s method; “portray her as pro-Indian and pro-American”. A smear campaign was launched, Ms Jinnah brutally vilified, and without a caretaker government, the state machinery could suppress opposition enough to guarantee victory.

Defeated, Ms Jinnah returned to retirement, where she would remain until her death. Her life post-partition was described as “wrought with disappointments, disillusionment and eventual isolation”.

Is a woman never an individual in her own right?

Now that she has left this world, Ms Jin­nah is often referred to as ‘Madar-i-Millat’, mother of the nation. It’s an oddly specific title, considering she was never a mother to anyone: she stayed unmarried until her death at 73. Coincidence? Or do we only deem a woman as respectable by virtue of connection to a man? As a mother, as a sister, but never as an individual in her own right?

In school, my history books mentioned Ms Jinnah as an inspiration because of her ‘support for her brother’ and for being ‘highly educated in dentistry’. While this may be well-intentioned, it’s a disgrace to the legacy of a fiercely independent voice for democracy. Hailing Ms Jinnah for her services to dentistry is like praising Gandhi for being a wonderful tailor. It’s not incorrect, but if that’s the one thing you choose to focus your attention on, there’s something seriously wrong with you.

This lifetime vilification and posthumous reverence tells you a lot about the way Pakistan treats its women. And to put it bluntly, we seem to find the living, breathing, working ones to be awfully inconvenient. The dead can be retrospectively whitewashed, their legacy steered away from what they were, and towards what we would have preferred them to be; polite, perpetually silent background characters, no purpose to their existence beyond furthering the ambitions of the men around them.

Ask yourself this: if Malala had succumbed to her injuries, would she not have been immortalised as a national hero? But she lived, and remained vocal, much to the annoyance of those who’d have preferred to remember her as a silent martyr. Asma Jahangir was a deeply divisive figure before her death, as was Benazir Bhutto. Here’s a thought — can you think of a single Pakistani woman who was universally acclaimed while she was still breathing?

This is the uncomfortable truth that Fatima Jinnah’s story unravels; it’s really the story of millions of Pakistani women who have been held back by a rigged, patriarchal status quo. (The WEF’s Global Gender Gap Report ranks Pakistan 145th in a survey of 146 countries). Nevertheless, many persevered. We’ve had a female prime minister and a Nobel laureate. In 2030, we will have a female chief justice. But even the greatest success stories pose the question — did they succeed because of the system, or in spite of it?

And any system which exists to serve the people of a country but fails to represent half of it can only be described as a failure. Consider the judiciary. In Pakistan’s history, almost all judges have been male. Many have been quick to proclaim the genderless nature of the job. That justice must be blind, so the background of the person dispensing it must not be relevant.

Yet in 75 years it didn’t occur to a single one of those (male) judges to question why the legal system was subjecting survivors of sexual assault to ‘two-finger virginity testing’. All it took was one woman to see this absurdity for what it was, and in 2021, a judgement authored by Justice Ayesha A. Malik abolished the practice.

What this illustrates is a simple point we still manage to fumble: equal representation, at every stage of the workforce, matters. If this imbalance is to be corrected, it will require Pakistani men to make this common-sense demand in equal amounts as women. It will require them to make room for inclusivity in historically homogenous spaces. And inevitably, it will make many of them deeply uncomfortable.

But that’s a price we should all be willing to pay. Lest we fail to learn from how we treated the ‘mother of the nation’ and end up treating its daughters the same way.

The writer is a lawyer and columnist from Okara, based in Islamabad.
Twitter: @hkwattoo1

Published in Dawn, January 15th, 2023