Daily Times

Two months after a medical student courageously named her attacker from her death bed — Mujahidullah Afridi is finally in Pakistani custody. That it took Interpol to pick up the nephew of PTI district president Aftab Alam from the UAE and hand him over speaks well of the international police organisation. Sadly, it does not do the same for this country’s law enforcement agents who may or may not have their hands tied due to certain political patronage; whether in Karachi or in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Nevertheless, the local authorities did act swiftly in notifying Interpol, which, in turn, promptly issued an arrest warrant for Afridi’s arrest. Thus, on paper at least, it seems that justice has been (retrospectively) delivered to Asma Rani; the medial student who fell foul of a rejected suitor who thought it better to put bullets in her head than accept that no means no.

And this problem of male entitlement is something that Pakistan has not managed to tackle. Admittedly, this is not peculiar to this country. But here, there are far too many who are willing to settle for Pakistani exceptionalism on the violent misogyny front. We have seen this in the not-so-veiled qualifiers that accompanied condemnation of Qandeel Baloch’s murder that ultimately rendered them anything but. This makes the work of progressive forces all the more difficult; though feminist backlashes can be seen the world over, particularly in light of Hollywood’s #MeToo movement. For even within enlightened circles, women are in a minority and male allies are often unwilling to get off centre stage. Indeed, some have even been known to take affront at women daring to hold events that exclude them.

But for all the necessary talk of women pushing back and doing their best to reclaim the public space — there needs to be a reimagining of what that is in Pakistan. For bluntly put, here in this hard country men do not recognise the public-private divide. They only see ‘their space’. Asma Rani was a young woman studying medicine in a province typically stereotyped as being conservative. Meaning that she was doing her part in smashing the patriarchy. But women cannot do this alone. In order to defeat the latter — men need to be neutralised; especially figuratively speaking. For the far greater struggle will be to disarm men in terms of violent entitlement that casts women in the role of essentially non-sentient beings.

The struggle is very real.  *

Published in Daily Times, March 11^th 2018.