by Razeshta Sethna

For most governments that have come and gone, Pakistan’s women haven’t mattered. Gaunt and broken, fifty-something Shahnaz Bibi was paraded naked in her village of Neelor Bala in Haripur district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in June.

Her son was accused of having an affair with a married woman, but it was Shahnaz who was punished when some influential men of the area decided to take matters into their own hands. The devastating impact of male-dominated parallel justice systems have destroyed, and taken, the lives of Pakistani women.

Often delivered through jirgas (although not, it appears, in Shahnaz’s case), these decisions may be speedy, low-cost and sanctioned by tradition but are also unregulated, discriminatory and prey on the vulnerable to settle feuds. Raping and murdering women, bartering them like objects and even burying them alive are not seen as crimes by the men who sanction these acts. In fact, perpetuating crime is the end result of these settlements, in which women are offered as compensation. The verdict of male relatives is the final word.

Female victims don’t get justice given misogynistic politico-legal institutions in Pakistan. Crimes such as rape, domestic violence and murder in the name of ‘honour’ are not only under-reported but often perceived as part of tribal tradition, in which women must be taught a lesson for ‘shaming’ their families (by exercising individual will) or punished for the missteps of their male relatives.

In 2008, when three young women were shot and buried alive in the Naseerabad district of Balochistan, I was anchoring a news programme and asked Senator Israrullah Zehri, a member of parliament from Balochistan (and later a federal minister), for his reaction. He replied that honour killings were part of tribal custom and that when women disobey they must be taught a lesson. I insisted that the senator must have a logical reason for defending three murders. These are centuries-old traditions, Zehri said, refusing to condemn the crime. He vehemently reiterated that women are punished for attempting to marry of their own free will. The perpetrators were protected; a solitary female senator who talked of the incident back then was
attacked by her male colleagues.

Often women are not murdered or abused by strangers but by immediate relatives. Honour for men is connected to women’s actions because they are their families’ ‘property’. Law-enforcement authorities fail to conduct investigations, despite evidence of murder, at the behest of the family because male relatives have ‘avenged their honour’. In rare cases even when the judiciary sentences male relatives accused of an honour killing, the sentence is shockingly light, reinforcing perceptions that men can kill female relatives with impunity and that the state apparatus — the police, the judiciary — deals with such crimes with leniency. Honour-based violence also goes unpunished because victims either live in fear or are killed with the complicity of other female relatives.

The law provides loopholes ensuring offenders get minimum sentences or a negotiated compromise. Under Pakistan’s penal code, honour killing is perceived as murder. However, the law states that the victim’s family is allowed to compromise with the alleged perpetrator, who in the case of honour killings in Pakistan is often himself a member of the family. When a father, husband, brother or uncle murders in the name of honour, the victim’s mother normally supports the crime, often as a silent spectator, rarely speaking out if male relatives are directly complicit.

The 1990 law of qisas and diyat spans offences relating to physical injury, manslaughter and murder, but the way it is framed
means the law is directed against the victim. The victim or his/her heirs are not bound by the state to prosecute the offender.

Some families accept monetary or other compensation as a compromise. Also, punishment equal to the crime is acceptable under Islamic injunction. This only reiterates that an honour killing is a family affair and that prosecution and judicial redress are not inevitable but may be negotiated.

Of late the country’s chief justice has side-stepped conservative sentiment, if carefully, to ensure that the Law and Justice Commission suggests amendments in the law to curb the practice of offering girls and women in marriage to settle tribal feuds on the intervention of panchayats. The practice of badal-i-sulha (compensation for compromise) in rural areas needs to be abolished and independent monitoring groups must ensure that tradition isn’t used as an excuse to treat women unjustly.

Pakistan is a complex country where conservatism merges with tribal codes, Islamic law and a colonial judicial legacy to the detriment of women. Increasingly obvious is the paradigm shift of mindsets reverting to a traditionalism in which honour crimes are permissible. An elite class that agitates for change hasn’t created enough ripples in the world of male-dominated politics in which powerful men, some even Ivy League educated feudal landowners, hold the fate of women’s lives tightly in their fists.

In The Wandering Falcon, short-story writer Jamil Ahmed describes a conversation between a young man and his lover who have fled her family but are about to be captured. Knowing that her family will kill her, he offers to do the deed himself: “…

there is no escape for any of us. There was never any escape. You know what I have to do now?” Ahmed wrote this story, ‘The Sins of the Mother’, back in 1973.

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