PakAlumni Worldwide: The Global Social Network
The Global Social Network
Qandeel Baloch: Leading Social Revolution in Pakistan
Could Qandeel Baloch, also known as Pakistan's Kim Kardashian, even be imagined in conservative Pakistan just a few years ago? Doesn't the fact that she existed is in itself a sign of a social revolution sweeping Pakistan today?
Tragic honor killing of Pakistani social media phenomenon Qandeel Baloch by her own brother in the city of Multan in highly conservative Seraiki region has received global media coverage. It's being offered as yet another example to support their convenient narrative of unspeakable brutality against women in Muslim Pakistan.
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Fauzia Azeem AKA Qandeel Baloch |
Unanswered Questions:
What is missing from the news reports, op-ed pieces and editorials about these incidents, however, is any serious research and analysis to answer the following:
A. Why are such events happening with increasing frequency?
B. Is it because Pakistanis' sense of "honor" has suddenly become more acute?
C. Or, is it because Pakistani girls are defying old traditions in much larger numbers than ever before?
Going by Karachi-based architect and sociologist Arif Hasan's insight into Pakistani society, the answer is C. As he said in a 2015 interview with The News: "Media projects a lot of injustices against women, but they do not project the changes taking place, nor are they projecting the role models who are challenging these traditional barriers. Role models, too, are just individual cases, like Malala."
Enabling Environment:
What is the enabling environment for these social changes?
There are a number of enabling factors ranging from increasing rural-to-urban migration to greater access to education and technology and growing opportunities for communication and self-expression via the new social media like Facebook. Here are a few them:
1. Pakistani women and girls in rural areas and small towns are better educated than ever before. Since 2000, over twenty universities have been established in small towns of Pakistan where men and women from small towns and villages are enrolling and graduating.
2. Young men and women are questioning conservative traditional values with rapidly growing access to television, cell phones and social media.
3. Nearly a quarter of Pakistani females over the age of 10 now work, up from 14 percent a decade ago, according to government data. Women now hold 78 of the 342 seats in the National Assembly. Women now make up 4.6% of board members of Pakistani companies, a tad lower than the 4.7% average in emerging Asia, but higher than 1% in South Korea, 4.1% in India and Indonesia, and 4.2% in Malaysia, according to a February 2011 report on women in the boardrooms.
4. Court marriages that were rare just a decade ago have increased dramatically. Girls and boys are defying their parents by rejecting arranged marriages.
Causes of Violence Against Women:
Whether it was the bloody Civil War to abolish slavery in America or the Meiji Restoration that transformed feudal Japan into an industrial giant, history tells us that violent conflict has been an integral part of the process of social change. Pakistan, too, is experiencing a similar violent social revolution. It started well before the terrorist attacks of 911 and the subsequent US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. It has only intensified after these events.
The "peace of the dead" has ended with the continuing "eclipse of feudalism" in Pakistan. A significant part of the what the world media, politicians and pundits call terrorism is in fact an "unplanned revolution" in the words of a Pakistani sociologist, a revolution that could transform Pakistani society for the better in the long run.
Violence is being used by the defenders of a range of old feudal and tribal values in Pakistan. Some of the traditionalists are fighting to keep girls at home and out of schools and workplaces while others are insisting on continuing traditional arranged and sometimes forced marriages within their clans. Such violence is being met with brave defiance, particularly by the younger generation.
Sociologist Arif Hasan's Insights:
Media coverage of the attempt on Swat schoolgirl Malala Yosufzai's life by the Taliban has brought attention to what the tribal traditionalists see as a serious threat to their old feudal-tribal ways. In an October 2012 speech at a social scientists conference in the Nepalese capital Kathmandu, Arif Hasan recalled what a village elder in Sindh told him about the reasons for the increase in honor killings. He said: “The young people, they’ve gone to the city, and they’ve done all the wrong things. The girls have learned how to read and write, they’ve gone to school, some of them have gone to university as well. They have no morals left, so this is bound to happen.”
When Hasan asked the village elder as to when will the honor killings stop? He replied: “The honor killings will stop when everyone becomes shameless, then it will end.” Then he added, “But I hope that I die before that day.” Hasan says "he was a man of the old, feudal rural culture, with its own pattern of behavior and way of thinking. He was part of it, and it was dying, so he wished to die with it."
There was a news story this morning about young Pakistanis engaging in Internet dating and marriages. In 1992, the applications for court marriages in Karachi amounted to about 10 or 15, mainly applications from couples who were seeking the protection of the court for wedlock without familial consent, according to Arif Hasan. By 2006, it increased to more than 250 applications for court marriages per day in Karachi. Significantly, more than half of the couples seeking court recognition of their betrothal came from rural areas of Sindh. This is yet another indication of how the entire feudal system and its values are in rapid collapse.
Rapid urbanization , rising economic mobility and media and telecom revolutions have been the key contributors to the process of social change in the country. New York Times' Sabrina Tavernise described the rise of Pakistan's middle class in a story from Pakistani town of Muzaffargarh in the following words:
For years, feudal lords reigned supreme, serving as the police, the judge and the political leader. Plantations had jails, and political seats were practically owned by families.
Instead of midwifing democracy, these aristocrats obstructed it, ignoring the needs of rural Pakistanis, half of whom are still landless and desperately poor more than 60 years after Pakistan became a state.
But changes began to erode the aristocrats’ power. Cities sprouted, with jobs in construction and industry. Large-scale farms eclipsed old-fashioned plantations. Vast hereditary lands splintered among generations of sons, and many aristocratic families left the country for cities, living beyond their means off sales of their remaining lands. Mobile labor has also reduced dependence on aristocratic families.
In Punjab, the country’s most populous province, and its most economically advanced, the number of national lawmakers from feudal families shrank to 25 percent in 2008 from 42 percent in 1970, according to a count conducted by Mubashir Hassan, a former finance minister, and The New York Times.
“Feudals are a dying breed,” said S. Akbar Zaidi, a Karachi-based fellow with the Carnegie Foundation. “They have no power outside the walls of their castles.”
As early as 1998 when the last census was held, researcher Reza Ali found that Pakistan was almost half urban and half rural, using a more useful definitions of ‘urban’, and not the outdated definition of the Census Organization which excludes the huge informal settlements in the peri-urban areas of the cities which are very often not part of the metropolitan areas.
A 2012 study of 22 nations conducted by Prof Miles Corak for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has found that upward economic mobility to be greater in Pakistan than the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, China and 5 other countries. The study's findings were presented by the author in testimony to the US Senate Finance Committee on July 6, 2012.
Pakistan's media and telecom revolution that began during the Musharaf years is continuing unabated. In addition to financial services, the two key service sectors with explosive growth in last decade (1999-2009) in Pakistan include media and telecom, both of which have helped create jobs and empowered women. The current media revolution sweeping the nation began ten years ago when Pakistan had just one television channel, according to the UK's Prospect Magazine. Today it has over 100. Pakistan is among the five most dynamic economies of developing Asia in terms of increased penetration of mobile phones, internet and broadband, according to the Information Economy Report, 2009 published by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad). Among the five countries in terms of mobile penetration in South Asia, Pakistan is placed at number three followed by Sri Lanka and Bhutan. Iran and Maldives are ranked above Pakistan.
Here's how Arif Hasan concluded his Kathmandu speech:
Pakistani society continues in its state of flux, and the Afghan war has escalated this. The normal evolution of society has been stopped by the militancy in Pakistan linked to the war in Afghanistan. If you remove these militants – which you won’t, by the way – then a whole new world emerges in Pakistan, a transformation in a society trying to define itself. The recent shooting of Malala Yusufzhai has shown what Pakistani society really feels and how it thinks on issues. For the first time the Pakistani establishment – the army as well as the three major political parties – have all condemned the Taliban for the shooting. The people have spoken in the huge rallies, in Karachi and elsewhere. Earlier, this never happened because people were scared of being shot, kidnapped, and having bombs thrown at them. This is the first time that there has been such a huge public outpouring.
But even as people find a voice, we do need the inculcation of new societal values. The problem is, how do you promote these values and through whom? It is too much to ask media, and academia is busy in consultancies for the donor institutions. The literature is all about the struggle between fundamentalism and liberalism, but that is not where the problem lies. The challenge is for Pakistani society to consolidate itself in the post-feudal era. The society has freed itself from the shackles of feudalism, but our values still remain very much the same. There are very big changes that are taking place – how do you support them, how do you institutionalize them, how do you give the people a voice? I leave you with these questions, rather than try and provide the answers.
Related Links:
Silent Social Revolution in Pakistan
The Eclipse of Feudalism in Pakistan
Social and Structural Transformations in Pakistan
Malala Moment: Profiles in Courage-Not!
Urbanization in Pakistan Highest in South Asia
Views: 709
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Comment by Riaz Haq on September 4, 2018 at 8:28pm
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Her Father Gave Her The Courage To Speak Out Against 'Honor Killings'
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/09/04/644498267/afte...
In the tribal region of Pakistan where Khalida Brohi grew up, girls didn't typically go to school. Instead, some were forced into marriage at a very young age — and punished by death if they don't act according to plan.
That's what happened to Brohi's 14-year-old cousin, Khadija. Khadija's family had arranged a marriage for her, but Khadija fell in love with someone else and ran away. Then, Brohi says, "Three men arrived and they took her ... to a place where her grave was already dug and she was murdered by my uncle right there."
Brohi herself would have been betrothed before she was even born had her father not refused to sign the marriage contract. "It saved my life, definitely," she says of her father's refusal.
Instead, Brohi became the first girl in her village to go to school. After being exposed to books and ideas — as well as to the suffering of girls and women in her village — Brohi dedicated herself to educating women. She's launched several nonprofit organizations and speaks out against so-called "honor killings" — in which women are murdered by family members because of a perceived shame. Her new memoir is I Should Have Honor.
Interview Highlights
On her cousin's family getting money after Khadija's murder
This is this is very hard for me to speak about, but when [Khadija] was murdered, the boy's family had pleaded with them to take money instead of murdering him, and the money would bring food to the table of this family. And the mother would refuse to eat, and because there was nothing else to eat they would force her to have a few bites. And one day she ate from that food, and the next day she said, "I feel a cancer growing in me, because I ate my daughter."
On exchange marriages, in which each tribe trades a bride to the other in order to establish trust
Exchange marriages are usually very common between two different tribes. ... People who don't know each other and cannot trust each other. A lot of times even in small villages, trade also happens between their own tribes and so do relationships. But when there is a persistent offer ... for starting a relationship, then one tribe gives a daughter to the other tribe and demands a daughter in return. This is usually so that the daughter they've given is kept happy, and in any given good facilities of life, and if she's ever beaten in the other tribe, they would beat this daughter.
On how she was nearly in an exchange marriage before she was born
Before I was born, my uncle ... who at this time had murdered his own wife, decided that he's going to marry again and he needed another wife, but the family he was asking that woman from demanded an exchange, and there was no one else to be given, so he asked my father, who was his youngest brother, ... to give his first daughter as an exchange. ...
This was the first time when [my father] said no. He refused his father, he refused his brother, because he said ..., "Before even I hold her in my hands in my arms I cannot make such a decision." And because of that he disgraced his family and eventually left the family to give us a new life.
On how her father's education affected the family
It's shaped the family to become who we are, and to give us the path that we chose, because when he made it to university, he started realizing the injustices even more. He had started thinking about women's rights and about the position he would one day give to his daughters. At the time of university he discovered that his village not only had given him opportunity to go to school, but at the same time had also made him suffer by putting him through this tragic exchange marriage to a girl he had not met ... and at the time my mother was nine and he was 13.
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Oscar winner filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy's #mobile #cinema is helping #women in #Pakistan learn their rights. Her team selected films that tackle income #inequality, the #environment, ethnic relations, and #religious tolerance. #genderequity https://www.fastcompany.com/90337127/this-mobile-cinema-is-helping-...
In 2016, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy won an Academy Award for her documentary film A Girl in the River: The Price of Freedom. The film told the story of a woman in Obaid-Chinoy’s home country of Pakistan whose father and uncle attempted to kill her after she married someone she chose instead of having an arranged marriage. This is not uncommon in Pakistan; the Human Rights Commission counted 460 such murders–called “honor killings”–in 2017. What’s uncommon is that this woman survived, and was able to tell her story.
When the film was released, it became headline news in Pakistan, and the prime minister invited Obaid-Chinoy to host a screening at his office, which was live-streamed across the country. On the stage at TED2019 in Vancouver, Obaid-Chinoy told the audience that after the film ended, the prime minister said to her, “There is no honor in honor killing.” He told Obaid-Chinoy that he would work to bring an end to the practice, starting with the fact that a loophole in Pakistani law allowed men who attempted murder to avoid jail if they secured forgiveness from the victims. After the woman featured in A Girl in the River left the hospital and began a court proceeding against her father and uncle, she received mounting pressure to forgive them. In the end, she did. For Obaid-Chinoy, that lent a fresh urgency to the film. “When such a strong woman is silenced, what chance did other women have?” she says.
After A Girl in the River won the Academy Award, the prime minister of Pakistan did close the “forgiveness loophole”: Now, men who kill women in the name of honor receive life imprisonment in Pakistan if convicted.
But the day after the legislation passed, Obaid-Chinoy said, a woman was killed in the name of honor, then another, then another. “We had impacted legislation, but it wasn’t enough,” she told the audience. The film had proved effective politically, but, she wondered, could it change culture and put an end to honor killings before they were carried out?
“We needed to take the film to the heartland, to small towns and villages across the country,” Obaid-Chinoy says. She and her team built a mobile cinema on a truck and began driving it to communities in Pakistan where honor killings were most prevalent, where they would host screenings of the film and discuss the changes in the law and how women can advocate for themselves. Sometimes, they faced opposition. One village shut the screening down “because they didn’t want to women to know their rights,” Obaid-Chinoy says. In another village where some men clamored to have the screening stopped, a plainclothes policeman ordered it back on, saying it was his duty to protect the rights of women to know their rights.
Since Obaid-Chinoy’s mobile cinema began rolling in 2017, it has screened A Girl in the River, but “we also began to open up our scope beyond honor killings,” she says. Her team selected films that tackle income inequality, the environment, ethnic relations, and religious tolerance. Often, they would set up separate showings for women of films that feature women as heroes–heads of state or advocates–and encourage them to step into those roles. For groups of men, they show films that feature men as advocates for women and show punishment for those that disparage or harm women.
Obaid-Chinoy recently heard from organizers in Bangladesh and Syria who want to bring the mobile cinema there, and they’ve begun to plan how best to do that. “For me, cinema can play a very positive role in changing and molding society in a positive direction,” Obaid-Chinoy says.
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#Pakistan to create 1,000 courts to tackle #violence against #women. Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, an independent watchdog, reported at least 845 incidents of sexual violence against women in its 2018 report. #genderequity https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/20/pakistan-to-create-10...
Pakistan is to set up more than 1,000 courts dedicated to tackling violence against women, the country’s top judge has announced, seeking to tackle a problem activists say the criminal justice system has long neglected.
Chief justice Asif Saeed Khosa said the special courts would allow victims to speak out without fear of retaliation in the conservative Muslim country, where domestic violence is often seen as taboo.
Pakistan sees thousands of cases of violence against women every year, from rape and acid attacks to sexual assault, kidnappings and so-called honour killings.
“We are going to have 1,016 gender-based violence courts across Pakistan, at least one such court apiece in every district,” Khosa said in an address to fellow judges broadcast on national television. “The atmosphere of these courts will be different from other courts so that complainants can speak their heart without any fear,” he said.
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, an independent watchdog, reported at least 845 incidents of sexual violence against women in its 2018 report.
There were no comparative figures and the commission had previously said violence against women went largely unreported, particularly in rural areas, where poverty and stigma prevented victims from speaking out.
The country was ranked the sixth most dangerous for women in a Thomson Reuters Foundation a survey of global experts last year.
The new courts will operate in existing courthouses, but will hold domestic violence hearings separately from other cases to enable victims to testify in confidence.
A pilot court of this kind was opened in 2017 in Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province.
Local high court chief justice Mansoor Ali Shah said at the time that women were the most vulnerable members of society and that one in every three had been a victim of physical or psychological violence.
Human rights campaigners said the Lahore court had been a success and welcomed the move to expand the programme.
Romana Bashir, who heads the Peace and Development Foundation, a non-governmental organisation working on women’s rights, said it was “a wonderful safeguarding measure”.
“Certainly women will be encouraged and feel strengthened to speak up against gender based violence. Consequently, women will be able to get justice,” she said.
Fauzia Viqar, a women’s rights campaigner who advised the Punjab government until last month, said studies had shown the performance of such dedicated courts to be “many times better than other courts”.
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'Pawri girl': A five-second video brings #India and #Pakistan together. Girl from #Peshawar pokes fun at #Pakistani "burgers": "ye humari pawri hori hai"
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-56107941
A five-second video has done the impossible - brought social media users in India and Pakistan together.
When Pakistani video creator Dananeer Mobin uploaded the video on her Instagram page on 6 February, little did she know that she would become an overnight internet star in both nations.
So you may ask, what's so special about the video? But before we tell you, you must watch the original video:
On the face of it, there is nothing special about it. She says: "This is our car, this is us, and this is our party". The video shows a bunch of young people enjoying themselves.
And that is where the answer lies. When the news has been mostly about death and despair recently, the happy faces in the video cheered people up in the two countries - who are usually at odds on most things because of the decades of sometimes deadly animosity between the two nations.
"What could be better than sharing love across the border at a time when there is so much trouble and so much division around the world," she told BBC Urdu.
"I'm glad my neighbours and I are partying together now because of my video," she says, referring to Indians.
Dananeer Mobin, 19, whose Instagram bio says "call me Geena", is a social media influencer from Pakistan's northern city of Peshawar.
Her posts usually centre around fashion and make-up.
In the viral video, she says the line in her native Urdu "Yeh humari car hai, Yeh hum hain, aur yeh humari pawri ho rahi hai" (you already know the translation!), swinging the camera around as she speaks to the viewer.
She uses the English word for "party" but pronounces it "pawrty".
She explains in text below the video that she's poking fun at "burgers", who come to visit the northern mountainous parts of Pakistan on holiday.
Pakistanis use the term "burger" to describe the rich elites who may have studied or worked outside Pakistan and speak with an American or British-tinged accent. The burger was very expensive when it first came to Pakistan, as opposed to the local version - the humble bun kebab.
"It's not my style to talk like this in burger style…. I did it just to make you all (my Instagram followers) laugh," Dananeer says.
She even says in the post that this is meme-worthy content. And she was clearly right.
Far from being offended, Pakistanis starting recreating the short clip and doing what Pakistani Twitter does best: making memes.
It wasn't long before some high-profile actors and cricketers got involved.
The Pakistan Cricket Board shared a video of the Pakistani national team doing their version of the video after winning a series against South Africa.
It also saw an explosion in popularity across the border after an Indian DJ took her phrase "ye humari pawri hori hai" (we are partying) and turned it into a catchy song.
Yashraj Mukhate, who has taken meme-able videos and turned them into songs before, gave a shout out to the "pawri girl @dananeerr".
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The #Indian girl killed for wearing #jeans . Her mother, Shakuntala Devi Paswan, told BBC Hindi that the teenager had been severely beaten with sticks by her grandfather and uncles after an argument over her clothes. #Hindutva #misogyny - BBC News
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-57968350
Women and girls in small town and rural India live under severe restrictions with village heads or family patriarchs often dictating what they wear, where they go or who they talk to, and any perceived misstep is considered a provocation and must be punished.
No wonder then that the alleged assault of Neha for her choice of clothing is just one among a number of brutal attacks reported on girls and young women by their family members that have recently shocked India.
Last month, a gut-wrenching video that emerged from Alirajpur district in the neighbouring state of Madhya Pradesh showed a 20-year-old tribal woman being beaten by her father and three male cousins.
Following outrage, police lodged a complaint against the men and said she was being "punished" for running away from her "abusive" marital home.
A week before the incident, reports said two girls were mercilessly beaten up by their family members for talking on the phone with a male cousin in the neighbouring district of Dhar.
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Reports of girls and young women being brutally assaulted by family members have recently made headlines in India. The incidents have also put the spotlight on how unsafe girls and women are within their own homes.
Last week, 17-year-old Neha Paswan was allegedly beaten to death by members of her extended family in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh because they didn't like her wearing jeans.
Her mother, Shakuntala Devi Paswan, told BBC Hindi that the teenager had been severely beaten with sticks by her grandfather and uncles after an argument over her clothes at their home in Savreji Kharg village in Deoria district, one of the least developed regions in the state.
"She had kept a day-long religious fast. In the evening, she put on a pair of jeans and a top and performed her rituals. When her grandparents objected to her attire, Neha retorted that jeans were made to be worn and that she would wear it," her mother said.
The argument escalated, resulting in the violence, she claims.
Shakuntala Devi said as her daughter lay unconscious, her in-laws called an autorickshaw and said they were taking her to hospital.
"They wouldn't let me accompany them so I alerted my relatives who went to the district hospital looking for her but couldn't find her."
The next morning, Shakuntala Devi said, they heard that the body of a girl was hanging from the bridge over the Gandak river that flows through the region. When they went to investigate, they discovered it was Neha's.
Police have lodged a case of murder and destruction of evidence against 10 people, including Neha's grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins and the auto driver. The accused have yet to make any public statement.
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The #Indian girl killed for wearing #jeans . Her mother, Shakuntala Devi Paswan, told BBC Hindi that the teenager had been severely beaten with sticks by her grandfather and uncles after an argument over her clothes. #Hindutva #misogyny - BBC News
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-57968350
Women and girls in small town and rural India live under severe restrictions with village heads or family patriarchs often dictating what they wear, where they go or who they talk to, and any perceived misstep is considered a provocation and must be punished.
No wonder then that the alleged assault of Neha for her choice of clothing is just one among a number of brutal attacks reported on girls and young women by their family members that have recently shocked India.
Last month, a gut-wrenching video that emerged from Alirajpur district in the neighbouring state of Madhya Pradesh showed a 20-year-old tribal woman being beaten by her father and three male cousins.
Following outrage, police lodged a complaint against the men and said she was being "punished" for running away from her "abusive" marital home.
A week before the incident, reports said two girls were mercilessly beaten up by their family members for talking on the phone with a male cousin in the neighbouring district of Dhar.
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Reports of girls and young women being brutally assaulted by family members have recently made headlines in India. The incidents have also put the spotlight on how unsafe girls and women are within their own homes.
Last week, 17-year-old Neha Paswan was allegedly beaten to death by members of her extended family in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh because they didn't like her wearing jeans.
Her mother, Shakuntala Devi Paswan, told BBC Hindi that the teenager had been severely beaten with sticks by her grandfather and uncles after an argument over her clothes at their home in Savreji Kharg village in Deoria district, one of the least developed regions in the state.
"She had kept a day-long religious fast. In the evening, she put on a pair of jeans and a top and performed her rituals. When her grandparents objected to her attire, Neha retorted that jeans were made to be worn and that she would wear it," her mother said.
The argument escalated, resulting in the violence, she claims.
Shakuntala Devi said as her daughter lay unconscious, her in-laws called an autorickshaw and said they were taking her to hospital.
"They wouldn't let me accompany them so I alerted my relatives who went to the district hospital looking for her but couldn't find her."
The next morning, Shakuntala Devi said, they heard that the body of a girl was hanging from the bridge over the Gandak river that flows through the region. When they went to investigate, they discovered it was Neha's.
Police have lodged a case of murder and destruction of evidence against 10 people, including Neha's grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins and the auto driver. The accused have yet to make any public statement.
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Meet & Greet Went Wrong at Minare Pakistan
Now here are some facts that need to be cleared out because what Ayesha Akram said on TV is different. Because the whole incident occurred while a meet and greet occasion. Yes! Ayesha Akram is a well-known TikToker who called out her fans for a meet and greet.
https://www.parhlo.com/minar-e-pakistan-incident-publicity-stunt-or...
One of the most important aspects, she even didn’t file an FIR on that day (after the incident involving assault by 400 men), she was fully active on her all-social medial handles and posting stuff. After that Ayesha and her fiance made a video where they totally changed the whole scenario and claimed that they were just standing there.
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14th August 2021, Independence Day where Pakistani youngsters, elders, and everyone were celebrating the day on their own. But after few days something came up on the internet that became the main center of attention and took control over every social media account.
An incident is known as “400 Vs 1”. Yes, the incident where the TikToker Ayesha Akram has been harassed by 400 men. This incident shook everyone, from common people to celebrities everyone rushed towards their social media platforms and showed their support.
Every girl started calling out men as the rapist, culprits and so many words that they can use it. It was a horrifying incident, that one woman was groped by almost 400 men in daylight, and no one took any action to stop them. That made everyone even more angry and furious.
Up till now since the FIR was filed against those 400 harassers, Police have also arrested around 33 suspects. Within hours many of their faces were also revealed and published on different internet platforms.
It was considered as a big tragedy on the historic day of Pakistan and at a historic place. But there are always two sides to any story, not one?
Till now everyone came on and listened to Ayesha’s side which sort of look like preplanned. Why preplanned, because she paraphrased the whole incident and didn’t tell the actual truth to the people.
Meet & Greet Went Wrong at Minare Pakistan
Now here are some facts that need to be cleared out because what Ayesha Akram said on TV is different. Because the whole incident occurred while a meet and greet occasion. Yes! Ayesha Akram is a well-known TikToker who called out her fans for a meet and greet.
To the response lot of her male fans came and took numerous selfies. Even though her fiancé was also there and touching her very inappropriately in front of 400 men.
At the beginning of the meet and greet everything went smoothly. But as soon more people came on aboard her overenthusiastic fans couldn’t control her emotions and rushed over her which turned out to be a terrifying incident.
So, those 400 men weren’t strangers at all, they were her fans who brutally treated her, harassed her, and tore apart her clothes.
Which is worse and every single person should be punished at any cost. But why she waited for two days until the video went viral and people started talking about it.
Because day after the incident she uploaded her pictures where she was happily smiling and can be seen there’s no sign of traumatizing at all.
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Pakistan’s generational shift
By Dr Ayesha RazzaqueMay 22, 2022
https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/959718-pakistan-s-generational-shift
Last year saw the publication of ‘Womansplaining – Navigating Activism, Politics and Modernity in Pakistan,’ a book edited by Federal Minister Sherry Rehman to which I was able to contribute a chapter. It connected education with women’s rights and argued that indigenous movements like the Aurat March should focus on education as a core part of their agenda.
Detractors of Pakistan’s women’s rights movement have been taking potshots at it by claiming that the issues it raises are not the issues of ‘real’ (read: rural) women. Put aside for a minute the fact that Pakistan’s rural population now accounts for 62 per cent, down from 72 per cent in 1980, and is on a steady decline. While the numbers may differ, and women’s power to negotiate may differ, rural and urban women share basic challenges and better education can yield similar opportunities and improvements in life circumstances.
Indigenous progressive and women’s rights movements have adopted the cause of education as an agenda item but should make it front and center, specifically K-12 education for girls in rural areas. New data further substantiates that connection with numbers. Education up to the higher secondary level, just the education that rural schools offer today, is the enabler that brings increased women’s labour force participation, delayed first marriage, lower rates of consanguinity, increased income, increased spousal income, and is a contributing factor to greater freedom of movement and communication – all positives.
Studies exploring the relationships between levels of education and life circumstances around the world are plentiful and capture the situation at a point and place in time. The Learning and Educational Achievements in Pakistan Schools (LEAPS) programme is qualitatively different because it already spans a period of almost two decades. The LEAPS programme has been tracking lower- and middle-income households in 120 randomly selected villages across three districts in rural Punjab since 2003. It has been revisiting them since then, most recently for the sixth time in 2018, roughly once every three years. That makes it one of the largest and longest panels of households in lower- and middle-income countries. This study is also unique as it looks at return on investment in education beyond an individual’s income and looks into the possible spillover into life circumstances and quality-of-life which is especially interesting for those interested in women empowerment and feminist movements.
In this latest round it surveyed 2006 women now aged 20-30. All these women were from the same 120 birth villages and have been tracked to their marital homes within or outside the village if they have married, migrated or moved for any other reason. Preliminary descriptive results of the long-running LEAPS study tell interesting stories. The headline finding of LEAPS investigators is that Pakistan is in the midst of a ‘generational shift’ where, for the first time in its education history, we have a ‘critical mass of moderately educated women’.
In this generation only 18.7 per cent of rural women are without an education, down from 75.5 per cent from their mothers’ generation. Nearly 50 per cent have an education ranging from a primary to secondary education, up from just 20 per cent in the previous generation. A stunning 22.9 per cent have a higher secondary or above education, up from an almost nothing 0.3 per cent in their previous generation.
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Existing plans, at least in the domain of education, remain unguided by some of the very excellent evidence that is available. Meanwhile, the Planning Commission is organizing a ‘Turnaround Pakistan’ conference perhaps as early as May 28 to conduct national consultations. Whether a hurriedly thrown together conference can change the way business is done remains to be seen.
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In Pakistan’s Tharparkar, single mother defies gender norms to take up drumming as profession
https://www.arabnews.pk/node/2332731/pakistan
MITHI, THARPARKAR: Rocking a colorful Rajasthani dress, singing Marwari folk songs, and playing a drum that hangs from her neck attached to a sturdy blue strap, Maryam Naz, 40, impresses her audience with her performance standing atop sand dunes in Tharparkar, a southern Pakistani desert region where seeing a woman publicly singing or playing instruments had largely been unheard of.
Playing a drum, which is a two-headed hand drum, is common all across the subcontinent in countless folk genres, devotional traditions, and family functions. In Pakistan, most drum players are men, therefore, seeing a woman playing the percussion instrument in public is a rare sight.
But for Naz, a single mother of six children hailing from Tharparkar’s Mithi city, traditionally-defined gender norms could not become a hurdle and she chose drumming as a profession when things turned difficult for her following her husband’s death in 2016 nearly a decade ago.
“After my husband’s death, I faced many problems, I was unable to feed my children,” Naz told Arab News. “I had to earn for my children, so I decided to sing and play in public.”
Naz, who also sings in Urdu, Sindhi, Dhatki and Marwari languages, belongs to the Manganiar community, which has produced many traditional folk musicians in India’s Rajasthan and Pakistan’s Tharparkar. Members of the community are known for their unique folk style and have contributed significantly to the region’s rich cultural heritage.
She says she learned singing and playing drum at the age of eight from prominent local singer and drum player, Ustaad Soomar Faqir, while her skills were further polished by her father, who also used to sing and play drum at weddings and other events.
Naz initially sang and played drum at weddings, but she was criticized when she took it up as a profession due to cultural norms. She, however, defied the norms and continued doing what she was best at, so much so that many Sindhi-language entertainment channels invited her on shows and appreciated her music skills.
Imtyaz Dharani, a local journalist, told Arab News he reported Naz’s story for the first time on his YouTube channel, Indus Globe, in 2020.
“I saw her first time playing dholak in a wedding function in Mithi, where she was playing dholak in an amazing way,” he said. “So far I haven’t found such a woman dholak (drum) player in the Sindh province.”
Naz says it is often difficult for her to make ends meet amid rising inflation in Pakistan and due to inconsistent earnings, but she is passionate about what she does.
“I could have another profession for earning, but I was passionate [about playing drum and singing],” she said. “I did not quit.”
Nadeem Jumani, a local poet from Tharparkar, said Naz had been playing drum alongside many prominent Sindhi singers, including Sanam Marvi and Allah Dino Junejo, but she did not get her due share of fame.
“She is a very talented artist, therefore [Sindh culture minister] Sardar Shah should give her a stipend,” Jumani said.
He added that Naz’s skills should be lauded as she was challenging the gender stereotypes created by the society.
“In a male-dominated society, it is difficult for women to do a government job, but she sings and plays drum [alongside] her male counterparts,” he said.
“After her initiative, the trend is changing here as other girls from her community are also coming forward to learn drum-playing skills.”
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