Elections in Pakistan produce more slogans than solutions. The parliamentary polls held on February 18, 2008, are no different. One of the leading slogans raised in the wake of this election was the restoration of the Supreme Court judges sacked and arrested by President Pervez Musharraf on November 3, 2007, when he imposed a state of emergency. Even before the new government swears in, it is confronted with the question of how to make this possible.
Asma Jahangir and her sister Hina Jilani are at the forefront of the efforts to do just that. They are neither part of the government nor are they members of a political party that campaigned for votes on the plank of the judges’ restoration. Still, Jahangir had a meeting with Asif Zardari, Benazir Bhutto’s widower who heads the party with the most seats in the new Parliament. Jilani, in the meantime, was poring over constitutional texts and was holding long parleys with a select group of lawyers and activists to find out how best the judges could be restored without jeopardizing the stability of the state and society in Pakistan. Both are convinced that the lawyers’ movement currently going on in the country needs to give the incoming government and the Parliament sufficient time to reinstate the judges.
The two sisters, born a year apart in the early 1950s to a soldier-turned-politician in Lahore, are topnotch political animals by any standard. From the independency of the judiciary to the holding of a free and fair election, from women’s rights to freedom of media, from equal treatment for religious minorities to justice for juvenile offenders—Jahangir and Jilani are hard to miss in the leadership of movements and protests that deal with any of these issues trying to address and redress Pakistan’s myriad social problems.
Maybe this has something to do with their upbringing. Their father, Malik Ghulam Jilani, was a colonel in the army before he became an opposition politician during the regime of Ayub Khan, Pakistan’s first military dictator who ruled the country between 1958 and 1968. Jahangir, however, says their childhood was not different from that of other children born in the same social class as they—the urban upper middle class of Pakistan.
“But there were some patches of progressiveness,” she says as she reminisces about those distant days in the 1950s. In all other respects, she adds, her house was a conventional Muslim household during the middle of the 20th century in quite a conservative country. “We were not allowed to remain out of our house till late in the evening. Our parents made sure they knew what we would wear and who we met, and we were never allowed to stay at the house of a friend overnight.”
By the middle of the 1960s, the political situation in Pakistan had started deteriorating quite quickly. The government was persecuting and torturing their father, affiliated to the Awami League, a party based in the eastern part of the nation, which eventually became another country, Bangladesh, in 1971. Because of the party’s anti-dictatorship stance and due to its relentless campaigning in what was then East Pakistan against the debilitating control of West Pakistan over the region’s economy, politics and security, he was officially regarded and treated as a traitor. Being based in Lahore, the seat of government in West Pakistan, he was also an easy target for oppression.
“We could not go to the birthdays of half of our classes and half of them would not come to our house,” Jahangir says while talking about her days at Lahore’s Kinnaird College, a church-run college where most of the city’s elite sent their girls for undergraduate studies. “Our house was under round-the-clock watch by the sleuths of the secret agencies, who kept a record of who came in and who went out.”
This similar background, however, has created two different — almost contrasting –persons out of the two sisters. Jahangir is flamboyant – her critics would say rather daredevil – but Jilani is almost a recluse; Jahangir is master of mimicry and repartee, Jilani is an avid reader and a known movie buff; Jahangir is quite outspoken, Jilani is very low profile.
But both are so committed to the causes they espouse that they are willing to forgo their individuality if and when the circumstances so demand.
Consider Hina Jilani leading a protest in front of 10 Downing Street in London against British backing for Musharraf’s imposition of emergency. Her sister Asma Jahangir was at the time confined to the four walls of her Lahore home under official orders after the emergency was announced, only permitted a close circle of friends and family.
Also consider how Jahangir — normally a happy-go-lucky person — broke down in tears on a somber, gloomy and chilly evening in early January while narrating her memories of Benazir Bhutto. Jahangir fondly recalled her numerous meetings, sharing with an audience of about 500 men and women – including Jilani and a number of artists, poets, writers, political and human rights activists and journalists – the lighter and more personal aspects of the slain premier.
But having personal ties with many of the political leaders in Pakistan has hardly been an impediment for the two sisters in the promotion of their agenda. Jahangir would openly criticize Bhutto for her numerous failures while in the government, especially on human right issues. Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, the head of the pro-Musharraf , Pakistan Muslim League Quaid-e-Azam, calls her sister because his father Zahoor Elahi once shared a prison cell with Jahangir and Jilani’s father in the 1970s. But this hasn’t hindered the two sisters from criticizing the government headed by Hussain’s party whenever it has taken steps the sisters deemed unconstitutional, illegal or going against the spirit of human rights.
They have also not allowed their political views to work as blinders from reality. Jilani has worked with the officials and ministers of the Musharraf regime for years to have a law passed on reforming the juvenile justice system. The two sisters have also worked closely with government departments on legislations regarding women, minorities and prisoners. While discussing the judicial acumen of a controversial former judge who was last year appointed the attorney general of Pakistan, they strongly criticized him for failing to show any spine in the face of official pressure but at the same time gave him credit for his competence as well as willingness to provide relief to the underdog. In a country extremely polarized along every political, social, constitutional and legal fault line, such pragmatism is rare.
In another respect, too, they have defied heavy odds. In a society full of larger than life individuals, building institutions is difficult, if not downright impossible. But the two sisters have left a blazing trail of one successful institution after the other to their credit.
The starting point was their father’s arrest in 1971.
“There was no one in the family who could file a lawsuit against the arrest. My elder sister was already married and my younger brother was still at school,” Jahangir says. This left only the two sisters, still in their teens. For 18-year-old Asma Jilani, as she was then called, this was her first brush with public life. The verdict she won was historic and so far the only occasion when the Supreme Court of Pakistan declared that a martial law regime was illegal. This must have been a moment of great triumph – personal as well as national. But Jahangir is quite modest.
“From experience, we have learnt that martial law is not a legal issue alone. The courts still can and have validated martial laws,” she adds rather ruefully.
In fact, the victory by pro-democracy politicians and activists in the Asma Jilani case was a short-lived one. After another military dictator overthrew the elected government of Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1977, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the martial law in a case filed by Bhutto’s wife (and Benazir’s mother) Nusrat.
By the time this latter judgment was issued, Jahangir had become acutely aware of another flaw in the struggle for democracy in Pakistan. Even if people get their political rights, they can still be deprived of their social rights, is how she describes this flaw. This realization might have come from her personal experience. She wanted to study law but could not attend classes at Punjab University because the then principal of the law college there had “placed a ban on married women studying in his institution.” So, she had to pursue her law degree as an external candidate – that is, by studying at home. Her younger sister Hina Jilani, however, took regular classes at the same university to earn her law degrees because “she was still unmarried,” Jahangir says.
With their political consciousness raised to a high level and their law degrees in their hands, the two sisters started working for the rights of women. In the early 1980s, they set up the Women’s Action Forum, which has over the years has spawned many other civil society organizations. The duo also established what in those days was the only women-run law firm in Pakistan. Named AGHS – taking its title from the names of its founders, Asma, Gulrukh, Hina and Shehla – it was to become some years later an important institution in itself, providing legal aid to women and running a shelter for women facing abuse at the hands of their husbands, father, brothers and sons. Both the forum and the law firm came into being at a time when the women needed them the most. Under the U.S-backed Muhammad Zia ul-Haq regime, Pakistan suffered its greatest ever setback on women’s rights. The dictator issued a law under his raft of Islamization measures that put Pakistani women under tremendous pressure. Not just their evidence carried half the weight of a man’s, they also had absolutely no say in cases involving rape.
It was also during the same time that Jahangir first went to the prison. “My father was alive then and he did not like it. My husband was also quite upset,” she says. But her experience in jail was to come in quite handy, not just for her but for her family as well. “The secret to spend your days in peace while in prison is that you don’t always keep your family at the front of your mind. They should be treated as people who you have a lot of love and respect but who exist in some far off place,” she says. While in prison, she therefore did not allow her children to see her, though her son was only one year old at that time. “They would not have understood why I was there,” she says.
The next big thing that the two sisters got involved in was the setting up of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, the country’s first organization working on all the areas falling under the broad domain of human rights, including women’s rights, children’s rights, prisoners’ rights as well as political rights.
“During the campaign for Jami Saqi, a political activist jailed for protesting against Zia’s martial law, we found out that some political prisoners’ families needed financial help too,” says Jahangir. “My father, with his vast experience of being a political prisoner, had set up a foundation for that purpose but we realized that given the enormity of the problem funds available with that foundation would run out sooner rather than latter.”
So, in 1985 politicians, rights activists, intellectuals, journalists, lawyers, jurists and teachers from all over Pakistan got together in Lahore. After prolonged deliberations, they created an organization that was to be membership-based, and its office-bearers were to be elected by the members. The agenda of the organization was to be set by the members through a democratic dialogue in which was no one was more equal than others regardless of age, experience, education and financial status. In a year’s time, the whole thing was put together.
The two sisters have received international recognition for their work. Jahangir is currently the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief and previously served as the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Arbitrary and Summary Executions. In 1995, Jahangir received the prestigious Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders, awarded by an international jury that includes Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Jilani is serving as the United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Human Rights Defenders.
Jahangir and Jilani have also faced a lot of threats for their work. One of the most dramatic instances was in 1999 when they pleaded the case of Samia Sarwar, a 32-year-old married women, brutalized by her father into marrying against her will. Her father did not however confine himself to conveying stern warnings to his daughter and her lawyers. One day, he sent armed men to the AGHS office in Lahore and had his daughter killed there.
People like Sarwar’s father have some kindred souls among Islamic fundamentalists and the media. Jahangir had to seek police protection after religious militants publicly bayed for her head for what they alleged were her attempts to turn Pakistan into a secular, amoral state, a la the West. In 1994, fundamentalists actually broke into their family compound and took hostage the family of another sister of theirs. (The crisis ended with the family unharmed and the militants escaping.) And after relentless slander against her in a vernacular newspaper, she took her three children to the house of the publisher and told him that he would have to look after them if something happened to her as a result of what the newspaper was printing about her.
She shrugs her shoulders when these threats are mentioned. “I simply ignore them,” she says.
It is because of this dauntlessness that the two sisters persevere.
Muhammad Badar Alam is Lahore bureau chief for the Herald, one of Pakistan’s leading English-language publications.
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