We celebrate our freedom.. attend some seminars, make a speech, meet friends, have dinner, all because we are free... But sometimes I fail to understand the very concept of Freedom. Some people around make one think do they even share our ideas of freedom, even after over half a century?
You go out for a lavish dinner with your friends or family and on the streets you find women and children begging for money as they simply have nothing to eat. Every time I pass this particular drug store in saddar, there is an old woman sitting on the footpath outside the store, selling pins and clips worth a few rupees only. The look in her eyes is totally disarming.. even if she's standing beside your car and saying nothing at all, her eyes say it all.. that if she doesnt earn anything her children at home would go to bed without supper. Once i tried to talk to her and the horrific stories of her everyday hardships brought tears in my eyes. Our society perhaps offers no refuge to such women as the people shun them while the authorities and police take their share of whatever little they had managed to earn.
Take a ride in any city across Pakistan and you will find the same women, the same stories every where. Why is it that today our streets give this vast contrast of lifestyles, as a rich woman clad in the finest of silk drives by another on the road in bits and pieces.
Are these people free or Do they even know what freedom is?
Hundreds of miles south of the capital in the rural Sindh, women and children work all day in the fields with the men, sometimes without any food or water in tempratures above 40`C even. These are the Haris as they are called.. the slaves of modern times. Their 'Pharoah' lives off them, everything from his crop
yield to his big mansion in Karachi depends on his flock.. the harder they work the richer he gets. Generations of slaves have known no other life than this, believeing that the master is thier 'God'.. he may reward or punish them as he wishes, they owe their lives to him! Some of these people dont even know they live
in a free country called Pakistan.. having absolutely no idea what freedom is.. some might never know!
Its a man's world out there.. one perfect example is the shameful Meerawala case of gang-rape in South Punjab. What is even more horrifying is that a village 'Panchayat' [local court of elderly men] ordered a young woman be gang-raped by the prosecution of the trail. This outrageous and immoral act shows just how
women are treated in our society.. especially in the rural areas where a girl child is considered a burden by the parents and usually married off in return for land or cattle. Worse even she may end up in some religious shrine as a servant to a dead monk or even married to the Quran! People trade women as commodities and
any time a man feels like.. he may sell off his wife or daughter in return for cash! Is this the idea of freedom ??
Ignorance and Insanity accompany each other.. and our people today are more ignorant than ever. Sector D12 in Islamabad became another example of just how insane our police force is when the authorities rampaged local villagers who refused to evacuate their native land, for the capital development authority. The CDA
thus brought in the police force and what followed is a totally despicable act of sheer inhumane behaviour. The clash left around a dozen dead as the police opened fire on the villagers, arresting hundreds including women, later rampaging their homes taking cash and jewellery.. all this in the capital territory. One may ask
are these people free.. or do they have any basic human rights even?
Some of these stories are repeated in most households of our society.. although most go untold, unheard. The basic human rights condition of the poor in Pakistan especially the women is really critical and one wonders if we are even ready to let go of these medieval practices of sexual discrimination against women, wether be it
in some household when a mother-in-law puts a daughter-in-law on fire.. or on a national scale when women are traded as commodities and slaves in our rural areas or prevented from proper schooling and education in urban population. 55 years can really tranform a society, a nation.. Singapore and Malaysia are few such examples, but
what if when one refuses to be transformed at all.. our society refuses to mature perhaps because our men refuse to surrender their authority over women.
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