WAF in Pakistan

Farida Shaheed

 

In September 1981, the Women's Action Forum (Khawateen Mahaz-e-Amal) was formed as a lobby-cum-pressure group for the purpose of raising people's, but particularly women's, consciousness regarding the issues confronting women and as a means for consolidating opposition against all those laws and directives (whether passed or proposed) which deny women justice and their rights. The historical juncture at which WAF was formed meant that it started with the odds heavily stacked against it.

During the struggle for Pakistan, an effective partnership had come into being, as in other areas so also on the issue of women's rights, between the conscious section of women and their male counterparts. Therefore the consciousness of being a distinct community which has to struggle for its own rights did not emerge amongst women. Independence gave women the right to vote, inherit, own, manage and sell property, to work and to have access to education. In theory then, women had very little to fight for. In actual fact only a very small part of such rights filtered down to the vast majority of women. Unfortunately, those women who could have led the struggle for making these rights a reality for all women were too privileged to perceive the problem, or if they did, presumed that it was just a matter of time before all women were granted their rights. Superficially, they may have had reason to believe this to be true. Government displayed a benevolent attitude towards women, government departments were progressively opened up to them, a few women rose to positions of eminence: in 1965 a woman, Fatima Jinnah, ran for Head of State, and up to 1973, the Constitution guaranteed non-discrimination on the basis of gender.

Just how superficial such concessions were and how tenuous their hold on their rights actually was, only began to become clear to women in 1979 when a well-orchestrated move to curtail their freedom and rights was initiated by the Martial Law Government. Handicapped by the lack of a movement, women were unable to rally their forces until the fall of 1981. When they finally did, (the emergence of WAF was the first such sign) they had no access to official channels of communication in the form of radio and television, nor were they allowed to canvass support in schools, colleges or universities. Pickets, demonstrations, pamphleteering and public rallies had all been banned, and WAF had to rely largely on its own resources for raising consciousness and creating a lobby-cum-pressure group.

WAF offered a platform for concerned women, but activists within the organization remained unsatisfied with the number and cross-section of women it was reaching. There were regular monthly meetings which reached out to between 200-250 women, but rarely more than 50-70 at a time. A signature campaign raised 10,000 signatures throughout the country, but each signatory remained isolated. Faced with the criticism that it represented the feelings of a small educated elite, and conscious of the limitations imposed by its composition of full-time working women, WAF sought to overcome these problems.

Given the severe constraints under which it was operating, how could WAF bring together the largest number of women to demonstrate a show of strength, transcend class divisions and create a feeling of solidarity as well as raise the consciousness of the illiterate majority, and reach across to women in a more immediate and personal form than resolutions printed in the newspapers did. These were some of the questions being asked by the Working Committee members of WAF Lahore in the spring of 1982.

The answer, which took shape after many brainstorming sessions and heated debates, was jalsa. A jalsa is more than a meeting, but not quite a rally. It is an event which involves numbers, a happening, with a certain amount of celebration. The components of the WAF jalsa were speeches, poems, skits, songs, and a final resolution. The speeches were delivered by women's organisations which endorsed WAF as well as working women whose voice is not otherwise heard, such as factory workers, telegraph and telephone personnel, railway workers, nurses, etc. Some of the latter read out their own poems, and well-known poets were also present. The speeches were kept brief, and the focal point of both jalsas was the message conveyed through the entertainment, and the resolutions adopted at the end.

The rationale for transmitting the message through entertainment was twofold. Firstly WAF started from the premise that most women live a life of drudgery and are well aware of this. To call them to meetings to tell them how miserable their lives are would be adding insult to injury.

The purpose of the jalsa was not to 'talk down' to women from a platform as is so often the case, but somehow to create an awareness that despite all other differences women share a common burden: in other words, to create a sense of solidarity. Therefore, WAF was determined to keep speeches to a minimum. The second reason was simply to provide entertainment to many women who otherwise have little or no access to it. Boring people had to be avoided at all costs; women who came had to be motivated sufficiently so that they would come again.

WAF Lahore held two jalsas, on May 14, and October 8, 1982. Both were unqualified successes. In May, for the first time in Pakistan, 500 women squeezed into an auditorium too small to accommodate them, and watched, many of them standing along the corridors, for the first time, a feminist jalsa. The anxious group of nervous organisers were on tenterhooks throughout the show, and at the end they collapsed into each others arms in jubilation. For the public as well as the press, it was in many ways the real debut of WAF, Lahore. In October, a larger auditorium was booked, which again proved too small as the numbers had increased to over 800.

Many factors contributed to the success of the jalsas. The absence of chief guests, special seats and other ingredients of officialdom set the tone. Women sat as they came, and slum women brushed shoulders with the 'cream' of society. This created such a tremendous sense of sisterhood that, in May, the final chorus sung by all present left many women with tears in their eyes. The use of the informal structure of skits and poems, both rooted in South Asian culture and hence familiar, ensured a high degree of rapport and understanding. Finally, the audience was not being lectured but invited to laugh along with the organisers at the absurdity of various policies.

Given the extent to which humour is used against women, it seems amazing, in hindsight, that no one had so far thought of using it for women. The skits performed in Lahore have been reproduced with equal success as part of other programmes by WAF chapters and at a May Day programme for a mixed audience of workers and their relatives. The skits themselves revolve around issues taken up by WAF. WAF Lahore is extremely fortunate in having access to various members of the Lahore theatrical circle who wrote, produced, and performed the skits very professionally (not to mention the ripple of excitement among the audience at seeing TV stars live for the first time). WAF supplied the scriptwriter-producer team with basic information and pinpointed the most immediate issues of the day, for example the banning of women from spectator sports, the move to forcibly veil women, the impending laws of evidence and qisas and diyat (retribution and blood-money), etc.

Feedback from slum, lower middle class and working class women showed that the best-liked events of the jalsas were not (as predicted by some) the big names in singing (who, like all others, performed free),* but the skits and the resolutions — i.e. those sections of the programme which contained the basic message. Whereas the resolutions directly condemned the directive or law in question, the skits used an indirect approach. For instance, the government has been considering an amended Law of Evidence which reduces the value of a woman's testimony to half that of a man's (a non-Muslim male's is half that of a Muslim male's and a non-Muslim female's is a quarter).

The skits mention the laws but they focus on what, to WAF, is the basic issue: the systematic halving of a woman's social and legal status. The objective of the skits is to highlight the absurdity of the suggested laws by exaggerating their implications. One of the most effective skits in this regard was an interview of two policewomen.

Humour is so culture specific that it is extremely difficult to translate jokes. Nevertheless to give some idea of the content, an extract is reproduced below:

REPORTER: Excuse me, I'm conducting a survey, have you heard about this new Law of Evidence?

POLICEWOMAN 1: Heard about it? In our department, it's already being implemented.

REPORTER: How do you mean?

POLICEWOMAN 2: Well, why do you think there are two of us here? If I'm by myself I can't arrest anyone properly.

REPORTER: How do you arrest someone improperly?

POLICEWOMAN 1: Look, what happens if a policeman catches someone contravening Article 420?**

REPORTER: Register a case of fraud?

POLICEWOMAN 1: Ah-hah, but if I catch him and I'm a single woman he'll be nailed under Article 210.

POLICEWOMAN 2: It's all a question of interpretation. A lot of interpretation is going on.

REPORTER: Interpretation?

POLICEWOMAN 1: She means, for example, if I get killed in action, they call it suicide.

REPORTER: If you get killed how can it be suicide?

POLICEWOMAN 1: If she's issued the bullets and I'm left holding the gun, what would you call it?

POLICEWOMAN 2: Yes, it's all part of the same thing. I get issued the trousers and she gets issued the shirt!

POLICEWOMAN 1: And another thing, we have to share our maternity leave, so if I get pregnant, I can only take one and a half months, she has to take the remaining one and a half.

REPORTER: But, supposing she's not pregnant?

POLICEWOMAN 1: That's her lookout.

Similarly, the skit on banning women from spectator sports revolved around a scenario of how women could play hockey in shrouds of cloth, how the male umpires (blind-folded) would judge, and how one could ensure that heavy female athletes were not really men in disguise.

Quite apart from the element of humour, WAF operates in a society where oral and visual means of communication are of paramount importance. For this reason it was decided to make a video-cassette of the second jalsa so that the performance could be shown in other localities and towns. Unfortunately the 'professional' male hired for the occasion failed to understand the purpose and did a bad job. WAF is still debating the best way of editing the (expensive) cassette: in the meanwhile it has been shown to limited but appreciative audiences. In addition, WAF Lahore and Karachi have jointly produced an oral cassette consisting of an introduction to WAF and the women's question, as well as a radio-play, songs, poems and skits.

Given the conditions under which it operates, WAF constantly has to devise new ways of reaching the public. For instance, to mark the first anniversary of February 12, 1983 when 300 women defied martial law and took out a demonstration protesting against the proposed Law of Evidence, and to remind the public that the law was still pending, teams of women spent the eve of the 12th this year plastering the town of Lahore with posters which read: 'One Woman — One Testimony — Proposed Law of Evidence Unacceptable'. While WAF has made use of other more conventional means of raising consciousness such as seminars, workshops, newsletters, pickets and demonstrations, its greatest success has lain in jalsas.

The jalsa format is in itself important because it lends itself to different situations. For instance, in a Karachi community development programme a small group of adult literacy teachers (young girls belonging to the community) were extremely frustrated at the high drop-out rate of women. They discussed this problem with two WAF members who are running the overall project and who did not offer them any advice other than to say it was up to the teachers to devise a means for motivating women. However, once these young women had attended a WAF jalsa, they immediately decided to produce a skit. The skit was entirely written, produced and acted in the local dialect by the teachers. In organising it, the teachers arranged a small jalsa of their own, complete with a stage, songs, poems and refreshments. This micro-level jalsa was in its own way as successful as the larger ones organised by WAF. It was perhaps even more successful in that it relied entirely on local resources and talent.

In conclusion, the jalsa has proved to be a successful means of raising consciousness because it is a culturally recognised concept, because humour and other indirect means of putting across a message can have a greater impact than straight delivery, because it is flexible enough to be adapted for micro- as well as macro-level performances and because it consolidates rather than divides the audience. However, the vital role of a strong and direct message cannot be overemphasised. In this regard, WAF learnt a valuable lesson in Lahore on March 8, 1984. It had been decided that all women's organisations would jointly produce a jalsa to celebrate International Women's Day. Unfortunately, because the skits had always been the high-point of the WAF jalsas, each organisation decided to make its contribution in like fashion. The result was too much entertainment with too little substance to hold it together. It is true that the event could have been better co-ordinated, but most women felt that the delicate balance (maintained thus far by WAF) of speeches, resolutions, skits and songs skilfully interwoven with a definite message was sadly lacking. A jalsa, as mentioned before, is not pure entertainment. It has a very definite connotation of coming together, to meet, to celebrate, to communicate.

 

Poem Written for WAF'S First Anniversary

Habib Jalib

(translatd by Jugnoo Mohsin)

No more a friendless world as it once used to be

No more a wretched helplessness or weak dependency

We know when we prosper or suffer at your hands,

And yet you believe that we still cannot see!

We can now be arbiters of our lives as we will,

No more a need to cower but to control our destiny,

As tyrants, you cannot remain enshrined in our hearts

For we are not your worshippers but partners in equality

No more are we supplicants dependent on your whims,

We have wisdom, we have knowledge and strength, tenacity,

No more of backward dogma or self-appointed priests,

All respect to the message of human dignity.

 

HABIB JALIB is a poet of national stature who was especially asked to write this poem for the First Anniversary jalsa of WAF. He was also present at the demonstration of February 12, 1984 where he recited his poem before demonstrators broke the police cordon. He was manhandled by the police.

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* The jalsas were entirely financed by producing a brochure which not only raised money but also contained messages and a few poems. They were performed entirely by women.

** '420' has become part of everyday language, a noun for anyone cheating or being underhand.