^ Pakistan’s biggest problem, the system is so loaded against the poor it’s quite depressing. While, the situation is quite similar in India and Bangladesh, something needs to be done. You have people in prisons, who have served their sentence even though they have never been convicted. Civil cases, which take 4 years for a decision, Corruption at the highest levels in the Judiciary, a politicised system of appointments, the list goes on and on.
LAHORE: ‘Justice - not for the poor’
http://www.dawn.com/2003/text/local13.htm
By Shehar Bano Khan
LAHORE, Sept 8: Each day at 8am sharp, the business of dispensing justice begins at the Aiwan-i-Adal, where the city’s civil courts are located. Hundreds of lawyers can be seen occupying a few inches of the courtyard , trying hard to look respectable sitting on rickety chairs and unsteady tables. The wide area of the Aiwan-i-Adal, covered by a tin roof, houses a minimum of 5,000 chairs and tables which, by overstretching the imagination, serves as the lawyers’ offices.
At one of these miniature chair-and-table offices, a woman draped in chaddar, stands wide-eyed listening to her lawyer. A few minutes into the conversation makes the woman turn more ashen than her already sallow look. Battling for composure, she takes the side route to walk out of the premises of the Aiwan-i-Adal, stopping to slump at the first bench she sees close to the main gate of the courts. She looks around the building with utter disappointment, her eyes spewing the anger kept inside her. It is then that the emotional ventilation starts.
The young woman called, Tahira, (the name has been changed to protect her identity) raises her both hands towards the sky and starts wailing. “This country is not for the poor. Allah! Please show mercy and tell these lawyers and judges that Your justice is greater and not partial like theirs.”
The woman cries out: “The judge wants me to produce my nikahnama. I don’t have it. Nothing was done in writing. Allah is my witness.”
In the next instance, she pulls the chaddar from her head to expose the wounds on her scalp and close to her temple inflicted by her husband. “Do you know what is the biggest misfortune here in Pakistan? It is to be a woman and that too poor. Look at me, I’m no longer pretty, no longer healthy and have no money, but I have to live for my two children. It would have been much easier just to die. Your police, your people working here treat a pretty woman differently. Bibi, you can’t even begin to think what kind of country you are living in,” a disgusted Tahira tells this reporter.
She slouches again on the bench, shoulders stooped, her whole body shaking with anger. Thumping her forehead with the palm of her hand, Tahira laments that being a woman is the biggest scourge in Pakistan. “For four years I’ve been trying to get a divorce. But no! I can’t get it because I am a woman who cannot exist on her own unless that man called my husband gives me the right to do so. The police, the lawyer, the court, nobody can do anything about it.”
Tahira is probably in her mid 20s. Nearly two years ago, she filed for khula (dissolution of marriage) at a court in Lahore. After an endless round of trips to the court the judge postpones Tahira’s verdict till the next hearing. At the next hearing, the honourable court finds some sort of legal lacuna which assures that the discriminatory nature of the law is heavily biased against a woman.
Tahira’s lawyer, who is fighting the case gratis, is in no rush to wrap it up. First of all, he is in no position to do so. And secondly, of the 300 or so cases heard by the judge, Tahira’s is just one small drop in an ocean. Why should anyone be in a hurry to dispose of her khula case? She is a nobody! A weak, powerless woman from Jhang is no threat to the irreproachable and upright judicial system of this country.
Besides, Tahira’s story is no different from the rest of the women pushed roughly to the sidewalks of society on account of biased laws or lack of influence. So what if Tahira is a poor woman who cannot support her two children? There are millions like her. Is the government supposed to ease each one’s suffering? No. Tahira must understand that there are other “important” cases which are pending.
But Tahira has not lost the strength to struggle, not as yet. “It is a matter of not my survival only. I have to think of my two children. I can’t send them to school and am living off the charity of a couple in Jhang.”
Even though, it all sounds so painfully familiar, Tahira pulls her chaddar closely around her body and begins to give an insight into the shadowy side of our society.
Born in Chiniot, Tahira was the eldest of her 10 brothers and sisters. At the age of four, daily dose of poverty and hunger forced her parents to send her to Lahore to work as a maid for a family living at the Mochi Gate in the Walled City. After around eight years, her father came to take her back to Jhang. Excited at the thought of going home, she had no idea what her father had in store for her. He was going to sell her off to the highest bidder! “I thought that our financial condition had improved and I was going home to be with my family,” relates Tahira.
The highest bidder came from Sargodha and took her away for Rs14,000. She was barely 12 years old at that time. The nikah was performed orally by a local maulvi. How could I know at the age of 12 that I was required to keep a record of that nikah?
The girl-child whose worth was Rs14,000 only was given a life-size view of what it meant to be a woman. Physical violence became part of her daily chores. “My parents knew exactly what my husband was doing. They didn’t care. I was used as a bundle of excess weight to bring food to the family,” says Tahira.
Valuing no more than the daily litter swept out of the house, her brothers-in-law tried to take advantage of her worthlessness. “I told my husband about it, but he really didn’t care. Every day I lived in fear of being beaten up by my husband and raped by one of his brothers.”
Her husband found a job at a textile mill in Faisalabad and moved there. “I was left alone in Sargodha to defend my honour.” A few months later, she could no longer bear the pressure. She made the mistake of asking her husband to take her with him to Faisalabad. “I was surprised when he readily gave in.”
But a change of place did not mean a change of life for her. Whatever little hope she had of leading a normal life, notwithstanding the beatings, was soon dashed at the sight of the lecherous, drunken companions of her husband. “My husband gave me no money, drank daily and had turned his Faisalabad home into a brothel house.”
Whenever Tahira complained, she was knocked around into silence. Her husband went to the extreme sadistic edge and forced her to spend a night with a man from whom he had taken money. “I asked him for divorce, but he laughed it off saying that he had bought me and as a husband had the right to do as he pleased.”
Resisting till the last shred of strength in her body, Tahira went to the police. They refused to file any FIR against my husband. Domestic violence was not an offence, they said, and was between a husband and a wife. They couldn’t do anything. “I had no money to hire a lawyer. So, in order to protect my honour, I took my children and fled from Faisalabad to Jhang.”
She had no place to go. Her parents refused to take her back, especially now that she had two children. A distant relative took pity and gave me refuge. “I am still living with that couple. I have sent my son to a madressah where he is at least fed. My daughter stays home and asks me every day when I’ll send her to school,” Tahira says impassively.
At the beginning of 2000, Tahira filed for khula. Till now, she has been unable to get her freedom because she does not have the official record to prove her marriage. “The maulvi who performed my nikah died nine years ago. Does that mean that I was not married and was living in sin with a man for 13 years? I feel trapped and suffocated. What can I do? Tell me please?,” begged Tahira.
What can she do? Nothing really, except hope that one fine day her husband would feel enough sympathy to let go of her. Before getting up from the bench, Tahira pauses and asks: “I want to work and send my children to school. Can you find me a job?”
A difficult question. Isn’t it?