HAD you been to Bagh-i-Quaid on Sunday a couple of weeks ago, you would have believed that Karachi was a city without women.

The Difaa-i-Pakistan rally, held on Feb 12, was a male event. Had you scanned the crowd you would not have seen a single woman; if you scrutinised the stage you would see only men. There were tall men, short men, bearded men, angry men and solemn men — but only men.

They talked about war — fighting wars and starting wars, old wars and new wars. When they tired of this they spoke of revenge, going through lists of horrors and humiliations to whet the hatred of those before them. There was no laughter, and no hope; only a belief in death, in mourning and in vengeance.

It was a changed scene this past Sunday when the MQM did what has never been done before on a comparable scale in Karachi. Hundreds of thousands of women poured into Bagh-i-Quaid. There were rich women and poor women, women in veils and women in jeans and T-shirts, old bespectacled women in wheelchairs and young women toting toddlers and babies.

Female volunteers clad in white shalwar kameez and baseball caps shepherded the female-only crowd; there were stalls for applying henna, face-painting, glass bangles, first-aid stations, even booths for locating lost children. Staff from the 332 MQM sectors had organised transportation to and from neighbourhoods to the rally site.

The buses arrived on time and the women were led in systematically. In speeches and songs they were honoured, out of boxes of biryani they were fed and for those who found the evening air chilly, there were shawls. There were no men and so nobody worried about being groped or chastised or harassed.The MQM is not a new player in Karachi politics and it carries the baggage of allegations and counter-allegations that accompanies all Pakistani political parties: charges of corruption and the use of force to silence detractors have pursued the MQM just as they have everyone else in the fray.

In recent years, the party is alleged to have been involved in target killings, in land mafias, in extortion plots and a bevy of other shady dealings. The MQM’s temperamental entrances and exits from the ruling coalition in Islamabad have been the target of many a glib jibe and snide asides.

I have no inside knowledge about the truth or falsity of any of the allegations, only an inkling that the MQM — like everyone else in the murky moral arena of Pakistani politics — comes to the table without a clean image.

Given all the disclaimers and caveats recounted above, what was groundbreaking about the rally in Karachi was not where the MQM stands in the intricacies of Pakistan’s party politics, but what it says about the emergence of gender — of females as a voting bloc and an identity on the basis of which voting decisions will be made.

Undoubtedly, the rally and its paeans to empowerment were an advertisement to position the MQM on the country’s electoral map as a liberal force that has grown beyond an ethnic party into one with a vision for Pakistan; one that starkly contrasts with the picture presented by the Difaa-i-Pakistan Council a week earlier. The site, the numbers, the show of force and organisation were all strategically calculated to propagate this very particular message.

In a country where people vote along ethnic, tribal, feudal, linguistic, sectarian or religious lines, the MQM rally, in being geared specifically, intentionally towards Pakistani women, has established the possibility of voting along gender lines.

It is not thus the rally, or the party, or the crowd that are notable, but the creation of a question that all Pakistani political parties must now be forced to answer: what are they offering to Pakistani women? Where in their lists of priorities will questions of women’s empowerment, legal reform, safety in public spaces and respect in the family or the workplace be positioned? Will women be relegated to the recesses of parliamentary politics, their interests compromised in exchange for votes on a bill?

In Pakistan’s 65th year, Pakistani women deserve some answers from their politicians. In creating an advertisement geared towards them, the MQM has presented its own picture of how it envisions women’s role in Pakistan.

In organising a rally of such proportions, in devoting millions to its organisation and execution, the MQM has demonstrated that it considers Pakistani women a priority, a crowd worth preaching to, singing to, promising to — a constituency instead of an invisible minority to be pushed into the invisible recesses of the domestic sphere.

The women who attended the rally, then, are not necessarily a show of force for a particular party, but the visible iteration of a large, interested, engaged constituency waiting to hear what the country’s rulers of the present and the future have to say to them.

The challenge to Pakistan’s political parties is a formidable one. In the days following, they can fall into the pettiness of poking holes in the MQM’s agenda and scoff at the rally as just another demonstration of the party’s monopoly over Karachi. A better outcome, though, for the women of Pakistan would be that all parties recognised that women are listening, watching, participating and voting; that they have particular concerns of safety, empowerment or legal reform that must be addressed.

In rally-ridden Pakistan, where all sorts are ascending to the political pulpit to say all sorts of things, it would indeed be refreshing — even revolutionary — to see more rallies geared towards women, more recognition that gender is a political identity.

The writer is an attorney teaching political philosophy and constitutional law.

rafia.zakaria@gmail.com