The terrible plight of women in Pakistan

Women in Pakistan, or rather throughout the world, bear the brunt of increasing poverty, colossal human deprivation, poor governance; discrimination based on custom, tradition, and civil and military strife.

While growing up in Pakistan is a perpetual struggle, to be a woman in this region is to be almost a non-person. Women comprise 48% of thepopulation of Pakistan. This difference in the gender ratio is also a reflection of neglect and social prejudices against female babies. But even this huge percentage is ignored or discriminated against by the political, social and economical structures of country.

Lenin once said that, "capitalism is horror without end". That horror affects women above all; and most cruelly in the so-called "third world". In Pakistan women face numerous problems of different kinds, including obstacles in employment, higher education, low wages, sexual harassment, draconian laws, restrictions in taking part in mainstream politics, social differences, domestic labour, honour killings, poor living standards and conditions, etc. The reason for this social degradation is acute poverty.

The vast numbers of poor people in the region are starved of sustainable livelihoods and a combination of basic needs. While both sexes suffer due to being locked in their rigid and narrowly defined gender roles, it is the women who pay the price in a much more obvious way. Underlying the inequalities faced by women in all areas is one fundamental dilemma: poverty. But Pakistani women personify a gender and class-specific poverty of opportunity. In order to understand women's position in Pakistan; we must address the way gender determines power, status and "control over resources".

In Pakistan, the hierarchies, through which not only women but also entire communities are oppressed, are far more associated with the semi-feudal/semi-capitalist system than with religion or culture. A gender division of labour reinforces unjust and discriminatory practices. Although women perform some of the heaviest, dirtiest and most labour intensive work, much of the labour remains invisible as it occurs either within the household or in the unregulated informal sector.

Women comprise of 30% of the total labour force, but 65.7% of this female labour force is officially accounted for in the informal sector. For many informal sector workers, perhaps the majority, working conditions and terms of labour are exploitative, characterized by low wages and long working hours with no protective laws. These are due to the policies demanded by the IMF. The informal sector is growing, which is making conditions for the working class even worse. The informal sector has grown 8 to 9 times since 1978-79. One example of this problem is that of the brick kiln workers in Pakistan. An estimated 100,000 females work in brick kilns, but they are not "officially" employed because whole families work in a form of bonded labour, in which only the male head of the family is registered.

Globalisation has benefited only a miniscule elite class of women, leaving the vast majority of women in the agricultural, formal and informal sectors to cope with the negative impacts of this "liberalization". Some 66.4% of the female labour force works for a living in the rural economy. The rural women are said to work between 12 to 16 hours a day. The female labour force has grown at an average annual rate of 16.7% over the last 15 years, although their position is becoming less secure day by day. On the other hand, women's participation in the formal industrial labour force is 34.3%, whether self-employed or contracted, they are exploited by everybody, from law enforcement authorities to petty moneylenders. The capitalist system regards women as a convenient source of cheap labour and part of the reserve army of labour to be drawn on when there is shortage of labour and then discarded again when the need disappears. The absolute domination of imperialism and the giant multinationals ensures that the last drop of surplus value is mercilessly squeezed out of men, women and children without distinction.

The slavery of women is worse today that in any other time in history. Up to 80% of women are subjected to different forms of domestic violence in their lives. Violence against women includes not only physical violence, sexual, psychological and emotional abuse. Physical violence includes murder, sometimes in the guise of honour killings, notoriously known as "KaroKari", female infanticide, stove burning and acid throwing. Sexual violence includes rape, marital rape, custodial rape, gang rape, incest, public stripping, and harassment through language, gesture and trafficking and forced prostitution. According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNPFA) 80% of the 600,000 people trafficked across international borders each year are women and girls. These include more than 25,000 women from Pakistan. This trade has an annual profit of 12 billion dollars.

Discrimination against women often starts before birth and lasts throughout their lives. The birth of a girl is regarded as a misfortune. Every year some 500,000 women die from complications arising from pregnancy and perhaps a further 200,000 die from unprofessional and clandestine abortions. The annual GDP growth rate is 6.6%, but whatever the growth has been, it is largely limited to the elite in the region.

Any so-called "benefits" of competitive markets and other mainstays of globalisation have been tilted towards the elite minority and have completely failed to alleviate the poverty of Pakistani women. Unemployment is increasing due to privatisation and downsizing associated with the race to become more competitive. Globalisation has also failed to address the issue of economic and environmental sustainability; instead it has force poor and uneducated women into a more acute situation of deprivation and subjugation than ever before.

The political history of Pakistan in the post independence era has been turbulent. Women remain severely underrepresented in political offices, civil services and other local bodies. They have hardly a voice in the decision-making forums. Their entry into politics is hindered by a corrupt money-centred violent political system. Women form less than 5% of the membership of any political party in Pakistan. Female participation in parliament is abysmally poor and most of the women elected to parliament on reserved seats belong to the traditional ruling elites. Things are even worse for women in Pakistan, where the Islamic Sharia is the law. Despite ‘constitutional' guarantees of equality, legal discrimination against women persists in terms of criminal punishment, property, citizenship, marriage/divorce, tenancy, adoption, abortion, rape and trafficking.

These discriminative attitudes were a part of our primitive culture but ironically during the dictatorship of general Zia-ul-haq these were made a part of our law. Women were bonded in the name of Islamisation and were restricted in the disguise of "protection". The word "protection" was potentially damaging for women. In Pakistan it meant a greater prohibition of women participation in social, cultural and political activities. It strengthened the perception of women as subordinate weak and incapable; a trend that is reflected in both laws and policies. Pakistan; in addition; is home to two constitutionally created bodies with supra-constitutional and extra-judicial powers. These "parallel judiciaries" ‑ the Council of Islamic Ideology and Federal Sharia Court ‑ have taken decisions that violate fundamental rights guaranteed in the 1973 constitution. One of the worst examples is the Hadood law, Zina ordinance, introduced in 1979 by the vicious US sponsored dictator Zia-ul-haq. Under the Zina ordinance, cases of rape have often been converted into sexual relations outside marriage, which are considered offences under the ordinance. Thus the risks for women reporting rape are manyfold.

In a society, where there is already extreme reluctance to report rape, because of social stigmas, women are further threatened by the law itself. Studies show that almost half the women in jail today have been accused under Zina, most of them awaiting trial. Moreover, the law is based on the Quranic requirement of four adult male Muslim eye witnesses for any accusation to stand. This essentially guarantees that no rapist can ever receive a penalty, as it is virtually impossible that a woman would get raped in front of four adult males with "good character" - and thus women end up being charged with Zina and imprisoned. This is the real barbaric face of Islamic reaction, but those really responsible are the imperialists in Washington and their stooges in Pakistan who armed and financed these monsters in theirs "struggle" against "communism".

It is also worth taking a look at high power levels, and those well-funded agencies of the West, created by the bureaucracy as feminist group and NGOs. These bourgeois and petit-bourgeois outfits whenever they gain influence in the labour movement invariably play into the hands of the most reactionary elements and sow confusion among the women who are moving in the direction of class struggle. In Pakistan an estimated 29,500 NGOs are currently working with the objective of "women's development". They have been a complete failure. Meanwhile in the last decade or so, the voice of feminism, formerly so strident in its demands for "equality", has got less and less audible. Why? Simply because the middle class feminists have largely won what they were asking for. These petit-bourgeois careerists are always in favour of the emancipation of women "one by one, starting with themselves".

Today NGOs in Pakistan receive more than Rs10bn in external aid. Corruption is rife in the NGOs. Feminism has nothing in common with the real struggle for the emancipation of women. They merely channel the revolutionary spirit of women away from the labour movement. The tragedy with these is that do not understand that not every individual man subscribes to an overt patriarchal ideology and not every individual women is in a subordinate position. They fail to see the overall structure of this capitalist society. We must oppose a partial approach, which places the cultural battle at the centre of our campaign independent of class origins.

In the past women were conditioned by class society to be politically unorganised and passive, thereby providing a social base for reaction. The bourgeoisie utilizing the services of religion, feminism, the press and media, bases itself on this layer to keep itself in power. But this situation is changing. The role of women in society is being more widely discussed. The constant attacks of capitalism on women will further radicalise ever-broader layers of women and push them in a revolutionary direction.

As Trotsky pointed out: "To alter the position of women at the root is possible only if all the conditions of social, family and domestic existence are altered."

The only road to a better life is the road of organized labour's struggle against capital -against all oppression, evil and exploitation. The interest of working men and women are equal, are one. Only in a united struggle together with male workers shall we obtain our rights and win a better life. No nation can develop half free and half chained - women have to organize themselves to abolish political, social and economic oppression. But this organization has to be on the basis of class rather than gender. Attitude shifts in society as a whole are required to overthrow the capitalist system and this is why the gender issue is not just one about women, but about both men and women and their interaction.

Achieving gender equality requires transformative change and nothing less than a revolution can achieve this. We have only two choices before us: either to adapt and succumb to this oppression and exploitation or to fight against the system. But it again depends on how much fight you have within yourself and how firm your belief, will and determination is in the ideas of Revolutionary Marxism and its capability of transforming society through a socialist-victory!