karachi: Malala Yousafzai winning the Nobel Peace Prize has led to jubilation. It also caused some low intensity myopic national outrage about imperialist manipulation or her being anti Islam; some drivel about drone victims being comparably morally superior; and some global silliness such as Time magazine equating her with singer Taylor Swift for setting success standards.
More relevant here are the reservations within her hometown Swat as they show how patriarchal ambivalences find resonance in the national consciousness.
To illustrate, this article juxtapositions three cases of gender-based violence perpetrated by the Pakistani Taliban in Swat.
Shabana was a performer from the musicians’ locality of Banr in Swat. In 2009, the Taliban stormed her house and dragged her by the hair to a roundabout where she was shot.
They threw money over her body as a symbolic message and many musicians fled the area. Her killing was seen as typical of Taliban atrocities. Chand Bibi was found alone in her home with a man, accused of fornication and publicly flogged by the Taliban.
Documentary maker Samar Minalla circulated a video she received of the flogging, which was repeatedly telecast and media sites were flooded with commentary.
A few journalists and analysts defended the assault as proper Islamic punishment, questioned the authenticity of the video and some even doubted whether she existed at all.
The provincial government castigated Minalla and declared the video a doctored attempt to derail the peace process initiated with the Taliban.
The Army operation in Swat started less than two weeks later. Malala was shot, singled out by the Taliban for being a secular activist and their critic. She was a well known child rights advocate and recipient of Pakistan’s presidential award.
We know what followed. Retired Gen. Musharraf’s logic of women having themselves raped to obtain foreign passports morphed into getting themselves shot in the head for the same.
In Swat, the resentment against Malala stemmed from her father’s public profile as politically Left-wing and her global, and for many unnecessary, exposure. Many felt that her recognition was at the cost of neglect of everyone else in Swat.
The perception that her family was “cashing in” was based on her defying stereotypical victimhood. Malala was not passive enough, traumatised enough, terrified enough.
But Chand Bibi was and is passive, traumatised and terrified. When Saba Khattak and I met her and her mother in their remote village, they were ostracised and living in abject poverty, dependent on the largesse of Sher Muhammad, who gave them rations. They wept at their ruin, saying all they wanted was to live.
When Fazlullah was named head of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, they feared being killed. I personally asked a senior, influential member of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf leadership to help her find any means of livelihood in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, to which after months of silence, I was told, “I tried but no one wants to help her.”
Shabana on the other hand, was the perfect victim. She died. Not only has she been written out of the narrative, there is no support for her family, or other performers in Swat.
The same year Malala was shot, another singer from Swat, Ghazala Javed, was killed. The police attributed it to “internal disputes” and across Swat many people said she had a “character problem”, so that was that.
Chand Bibi was not heard about either before or after the incident, and currently survives because a bureaucrat offered her a cleaner’s job in a school.
She conformed to all “victim expectations” and yet was abandoned. Malala though, was a 14-year-old girl, so the emotional connections were undiluted by judgements on women’s sexual agency, but she fought back, for which she faced both accolades and condemnation.
So we have a tortured, dead and forgotten victim; a passive, alive and forgotten victim; and a brave person who went through hell but refuses to be a victim. Instead of asking why Malala deserves this, we should ask what we have done to help women who survive violence.
It is not just random that Malala invited a gang-rape survivor, Kainat Soomro, who seven years on is still unable to get justice, to attend the Nobel Prize ceremony.
The writer is a researcher and consultant
By arrangement with Dawn
