The brutal machismo behind the honour killing of Internet star Qandeel Baloch and the uproar that followed show a socially divided Pakistan with reformists and rights activists taking on age-old gender biases
She was forcefully married off at age 17 to an elderly man, had a son whose custody she lost after ending her abusive marriage. Fled from her house and took refuge in a shelter home and struggled as a bus hostess before taking up modelling as a career. She lived on her own terms, was unapologetic, spontaneous and definitely was not causing any harm to anyone. Was Qandeel Baloch a threat, was her presence as dreadful as the looming fear of terrorism? Why does the freedom enjoyed by one woman become a stigma on Pakistan society, values and above all the ‘honour’ of a brother who she supported financially?
Qandeel, a social media celebrity, was strangled to death on July 16, allegedly by her brother in the name of family honour, in Multan, Punjab province. After the police officers assigned on the case bungled the investigation, woman inspector Attiya Jaffari has been given the challenging task of getting justice for her. Qandeel’s father filed a report against both his sons, Mohammad Aslam and Waseem Baloch, who was the killer. Police are also questioning Aslam, a junior Pakistan Army officer. The Multan police are including cleric Mufti Abdul Qavi in the probe.
Retired judge, Justice Nasir Aslam Zahid, said, “There is a lot of pressure on the judges to settle such cases amicably. The biggest loophole in the law is that of compromise and there should be no compromise on murder. No religion and law allow forgiveness after murder. The Qandeel Baloch case has now become a public interest story because of media’s interest. In such cases, the police lose focus and do not collect evidence with seriousness.”
Today Qandeel has become yet another figure in the long list of thousands of Pakistani women who are victims of femicide every year. Honour crimes across Pakistan have been on the rise since the last three years. According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, 1,096 women and 88 men were killed for honour in 2015. In 2014, 1,005 women, including 82 children, were murdered, up from 869 women in 2013.
The last four months have witnessed a surge in such cases. Last month in Lahore, Zeenat, 18, was burnt alive by her mother. Her crime was to marry her childhood friend rather than succumbing to her mother’s pressure for an arranged marriage.
In another case, near Gujranwala, a mother slit the throat of her seven-month pregnant daughter Muqaddas Bibi who three years ago had married a man she loved.
A young schoolteacher in Murree, Maria Sadaqat, 19, was tortured and set on fire for refusing a marriage proposal from a school principal’s son who was divorced and twice her age.
Earlier this year, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif resolved to eradicate the evil of honour killings.
The vow came in the wake of the Oscar-winning documentary, A Girl in the River, which highlights the issue. However, since then no fresh legislation has been tabled and the existing bill has been marred by controversies.
Imaam Mohammed Abdullah of Lahore said there is no place for women like Baloch in an Islamic society. “I laugh at the people who are saying she was wrongfully killed. She brought Allah’s wrath on herself and may I ask you what was so honourable in what she was doing?” he asked.
Despite an increased number of women in parliament and government, Pakistan has not moved forward significantly with regard to violence against women and discriminatory laws. Honour killings take place in virtually every part of Pakistan. In Abbottabad, Ambreen, a teenager who helped her friend elope, was tortured and then tied to a bus seat and set on fire. A jirga—a traditional Pashtun assembly of leaders that make consensual decisions in accordance with the Islamic law—ordered Ambreen’s killing as a warning to others.
“One of the main reasons is the law of qisas and diyat, which protect murderers who can pay the diyat (compensation) and get away with impunity. If the father is the killer, the son can forgive him and if the son is the killer, the father forgives him and this law enables the criminal to go unpunished,” says Dr Rubina Saigol, a Lahore-based sociologist.
Saigol explains that as long as property relations are there and women are seen as (property/chattel), they will not get full status as humans and citizens with the right to life (as guaranteed in the constitution). The practice of killing on the pretext of honour will continue —as it is an easy way to get rid of unwanted women and seize their property or otherwise gain economically or to get rid of an enemy by making him a co-accused. The practice is thus a product of the socio-economic relations of Pakistan and is rooted in material conditions which rely upon and support patriarchy as a material and ideological system that benefits men and subordinates women.
“The existing laws on protection of women are weak and it’s not that we only need new laws, but the existing ones are not implemented properly. The problem lies at the grassroots, police are corrupt and after every such case, the powerful abusers get away with partial FIRs,” says Tabassum Adnan, a women rights activist from Swat valley, and 2016 winner of the Nelson Mandela-Graca Machel Innovation Award. “People like me who work under such circumstances get recognition internationally, but our own government is not even bothered to hear us. Whosoever raises voice against these injustices is labelled as a CIA/RAW ‘agent’,” she says.
Unlike their urban counterparts, women living in the hinterland suffer the most. Rights activist Tahira Abdullah argues how jirgas and panchayats are illegal self-styled adjudicatory dispute resolution councils. “They mostly operate in the rural feudal and tribal areas of Pakistan, comprising only rich and politically powerful Muslim men—there are no women (consisting of 48 per cent of Pakistani population), and no non-Muslim members either.”
In 2004, the superior judiciary declared jirgas illegal and unjust, and the Supreme Court of Pakistan has been directing successive governments to abolish them and ensure that their illegal pronouncements (instant judgments) such as honour killings; gang-rapes and the horrific practice of Swara or Vanni are not carried out. Swara or Vanni is the giving away of little girls (some as young as a one-month-old) as compensation or blood price to settle tribal feuds and vendettas.
“Until jirgas are abolished, Pakistan will not see an end to honour killings and other crimes against women, no matter how many violence against women and girls and gender-based violence laws are enacted,” Abdullah says.
ln the long run, of course, the socio-economic equations in Pakistan’s male-dominated society will need to change in order to eliminate the economic base that produces such crimes and uses the discourse of honour to cover them up. Women’s equal status as citizens with full rights needs to be acknowledged and upheld by the law so that they are no longer seen as pawns in men’s struggle for power and territory and not regarded as property.
The author of Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan’s Religious Minorities, Farahnaz Ispahani, says, “Qandeel Baloch was a young Pakistani woman wanting to live a different life. She was killed for that in the name of men’s honour. There is no space for women in public life in today’s increasingly Islamist and brutalalised Pakistan. Whether it’s Benazir Bhutto, Mukhtaran Mai or Sabeen Mahmud—if you stand up you get shot down, notwithstanding how you stood up. The space and tolerance of the former Sufi culture of Pakistan have been severely eroded. Qandeel smashed the strictures of class and gender. She will be, even in death, a role model for some though the real issue remains: should women be killed for not conforming, politically, socially or culturally.”
In Pakistan’s machismo-obsessed tribal culture, the prejudice against women who chart their own course cuts across religions. In Sialkot, a Christian boy killed her sister Anum Ishaq Masih, who wanted to marry a Christian neighbour, but the family was against it. He killed Anum by smashing her head with a wooden log while she was sleeping.
Qandeel’s murder by her unrepentant sibling Waseem might have proved to be just another act of atrocity which created a buzz and then faded away. But in an unprecedented move, the State has played a positive role by becoming a party in the case and not permitting the family to legally forgive her brother. This girl, therefore, was an exception as she always claimed to be!