Take the bitter pill

Like MNA Ayaz Amir, I’d considered writing on Karachi this week. I’d thought of making a joke or two about Zulfikar Mirza’s recent altercation with Rehman Malik – which makes for easy pickings, after all. But it wasn’t meant to be. My attention, like Amir’s, was drawn to an incident in Chakwal; or rather, the MNA’s rendition of it via an op-ed in an English-language daily.

For those who might have missed it, the MNA started off by placing himself in what he refers to as the ‘distinguished company’ of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former IMF MD who tendered his resignation after being accused of rape. So, Amir has been accused of rape, we gather. We also gather that he considers the company of alleged rapists to be a badge of honour of some sort, but we’ll let that slide. The worthy MNA, though, wasn’t going to let things go so easily.

I am not going to discuss the veracity of the charges against Amir; not being associated with the case or the process, it is not my place to comment on it. What I will comment on is the manner in which Amir used his op-ed space to trot out every misogynist line in the book against his accuser; all the way from the ‘oh she’s a commercial sex worker (CSW)’ to ‘ha ha she’s so ugly, why would I rape her’. One could dismiss all of this as socially-conditioned sleaziness, were someone in a lesser position to spout this nonsense. But the alarming fact here is that all of this came from a member of the National Assembly of Pakistan. A sitting MNA seems to think that a CSW has no right to complain against rape. He also seems to conflate rape with lust, when in fact the former is a heinous crime that has nothing to do with sex, per se, and is actually a twisted, misogynist manifestation of power over the survivor. One could argue that the assertions made by Amir are nothing new; these are the first points brought up even by police investigators the moment they are handed charge of a rape case. But one expects an MNA to have better sense than the thhaana wallahs.

And this doesn’t stop at Amir either. His boss, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, has been known to throw his weight behind those accused of sexual harassment. A case-in-point is a recent incident from Punjab University, where despite the fact that an enquiry committee had verified charges against the accused, the PM allegedly stepped in and tried to overrule the committee’s judgment. Even the appointment of the new auditor-general of Pakistan – the highest office of accountability in the country – is fraught with similar accusations. Contrary to assertions made by the auditor-general’s well-wishers, charges of sexual harassment against him weren’t ‘baseless’; they were dropped, on ‘higher’ orders, using an obscure technicality despite the testimony of more than 40 eyewitnesses.

Perhaps the powers-that-be need to be educated about the very concept of violation of one’s being. Perhaps they also need to be informed about the definition of ‘consent’ – that ‘no’ means ‘no’. It doesn’t mean that the person is being coy and wants you to ‘try harder’. It means that the person wants you to go away, and if you refuse to comply, you are committing a heinous criminal offence. As such, a CSW can also file charges of rape; just because s/he caters to a demand for sex does not mean that s/he is ‘fair game’. Furthermore, rape is not about lust by any stretch of the imagination. Rape is not about a woman’s lifestyle choices; it is not about how she is dressed, or how she behaves, or what she does for a living, or whether she smokes or drinks. Rape is about misogyny and ‘power’ over someone who is either considered weaker than the perpetrator, or someone who ‘intimidates’ and challenges the rapist’s sense of faux-masculinity. As such, it has nothing to do with the survivor’s “looks” either.

If Pakistan were a person, it would be strapped into a straight jacket and thrown into a padded cell right about now. Not just because lunatics such as Mumtaz Qadri think it is okay to gun down people whose views might differ from theirs, but also because 52 percent of its population is constantly considered second-grade citizenry; because few women here can expect to be treated with respect or even like human beings.

MNA Ayaz Amir might have gained some sympathy for having to grapple with such grave charges, but he lost our votes when he launched into a filthy, misogynist tirade against his accuser. As a woman, all I can now say to him and his kind is: Yeh watan tumhara hai, Hum hain khvam vakha iss mein. As a woman, MNA Amir, I feel insulted.

The writer is a researcher and freelance journalist based in Karachi. She is generally found lurking in the dark corners of Twitter, where she goes by @UroojZia.