Where do Pakistani women get it from? It defies theory. Speaking generally, ours is a tradition-bound society where it is drilled into the girl-child's mind to mind the hearth and home and little else. Some would even argue they are brought up on a diet of submissiveness. How, then, do our women vastly outnumber men in the pantheon of courage?
Ayub's opponents couldn't find a man to run against him. They turned to Fatima Jinnah, and what a stroke of genius that turned out to be. The frail lady, used to living in the shadow of her brother, turned out to be more than a match for the self-proclaimed Field Marshal. She didn't have the Deputy Commissioners to coral the 'basic democrats' but she had more than what they had: courage of her convictions. To speak her mind, to expose seven years of 'development' as a sham, and tell all how that caricature of democracy (basic democracy) was designed to perpetuate the dictator.
People loved the sight of her standing on one foot to take off her sandal and brandish it at the mercenaries of law. They followed her and cheered her and made sure in defeat was victory.
She didn't win but Ayub lost.Another dictator and another courageous lady: Nusrat Bhutto, disheveled in many a picture, and in at least one bleeding, taking on the General. When the jiyalas were scurrying for cover she stood tall against the might of the state. Neither threats nor jail could diminish her anger, or her fight. She was of course fighting for her husband but showed others the virtue of courage.
She didn't win but Zia lost face.It was left to Nusrat's daughter - not her sons - to carry the baton to the finish line. If John Kennedy was around to write another edition of Profiles in Courage Benazir would figure prominently. She might have lacked political savviness in those early years, and had her faults, but if there was one attribute that defined her it was sheer courage. She put to shame the party's men when she was the first to jump over the barbed fence laid to restrain her movements; or how she smuggled herself out to a political gathering locked up in the boot of a car. Twice kicked out of Prime Minister House she kept fighting long after the pundits had penned her political obituary. The triumphant return home was bloodied by the attack on the cavalcade but that did not deter her. She defied the 'advice' of the dictator to return home again. Liaquat Bagh sealed the testimonial to her fearless courage.
She lost her life but Pakistan won. Democracy, with all its shortcomings, returned.
But these were the political ladies, and politics is the school of the best and the worst, teaching mostly compromises and betrayals but, occasionally, fighting for the just cause too. What about women outside the political arena?
How do we rate Mukhtaran Mai, who had the courage to go public much before me too hashtag became a wave? She shattered the stigma of rape. Government bribed her, intimidated her, put her on ECL. Many of us, to our abiding shame, looked the other way, and to his utter shame one suggested rapes in Pakistan were contrived to get a passage to Canada.
The original silence breaker, she responded to violence and gender apartheid with insistence on justice and education.
What about Malala Yusufzai? Shot for going to school, she turned an ordeal into an inspiration. She could have easily opted out, living the life of an average school girl in the UK, and perhaps continue writing her diaries of despair under the pseudonym Gul Makai. Instead, she stood up to be counted, refusing to be deterred by threats and taking in her stride all those indecorous comments about her becoming a tool in the hands of the West. It must have required a special kind of courage to make that transformation from the conservative Swat girl to making girls' education the mission of her life.
How many of her male contemporaries could measure up to the guts and raw courage of Asma Jahangir? When tribute after tribute started pouring in (inevitably, there were some 'good riddance' comments as well) we put it to friends "OK, we know what she fought against, but what did she fight for?" Most could not distinguish between the two and couldn't get beyond personifying her as an anti-power machine.
Yes, she was overawed neither by the power of the military nor the reach of the mullah; and pricked our conscience by describing them the way we wanted to but did not have the courage to. She defiantly fought the State, to expose its ugly side. She fought against myopic policies that put the country's future at risk. She fought against the removal of a Chief Justice and then fought against the same Chief Justice once he got restored.
But what did she fight for? Asma fought for voice. She stood for giving people, especially the weak and the vulnerable, voice. To be able to speak for or against issues that matter to them. By becoming the symbol of resistance against all forms of injustice and discrimination she showed us the way: to speak up for a cause, and keep speaking up until heard.
Good Leaders, to paraphrase MacArthur, never die; they simply fade away. But Nations that allow their message to fade away die. The real celebration is not in writing tributes but in emulating what they stood for. Let courage become a national trait.
For starters, let us have the courage to put women issues top of the national agenda. And what could be a greater tribute to our heroines than committing ourselves to education for girls - not education in its utilitarian sense of gainful employment, but to be better equipped to banish bigotry and narrow-mindedness and bring up more courageous sons and daughters.
Our messengers of hope have been women; women who for all their frailty and faults gave 'leading from the front' a new meaning. The followers will be amiss if they don't carry the message forward: To speak up and be heard.
On a personal note, thank you dear departed mother Hamida for raising a son who can't right the wrongs but can tell right from wrong.
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