Change this Misogynist Culture before Anything Else
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada

Prime Minister Imran Khan echoed the national sentiment of his people when, in an interview with a private television channel on Monday, September 14, he lamented that the gruesome ‘highway gang-rape’ incident had “shaken the entire nation.’’
IK was commenting on that bestial incident, on Lahore-Sialkot Highway, four days earlier, in which a young mother, stranded on the highway because her car had stalled, in the middle of the night, was gang-raped by two gunmen in front of her three young children.
The national uproar triggered by this outrageous incident in Pakistan evoked the memory of a similar gangrape tragedy in Delhi, India, in December 2012, in which a young university student was outraged by a clutch of drunken rapists on a bus in front of her fiancé. That ghastly occurring had sent a shock wave across India and shaken a slumbering nation to its core. Justice in that heart-wrenching case in Delhi took its own time, though. The three perpetrators of that crime were hanged only a couple of months ago. It’s shocking that both India and Pakistan—inheritors of the British judicial legacy- have both abused it.
But no less shocking in this tragic Lahore event was the callous statement issued by the CCPO of Lahore—the city police’s chief cop, in simple parlance—Omar Sheikh on the heels of the story breaking across the parameters of Pakistan. The man saddled with the responsibility to ensure safety and security of every inhabitant in his jurisdiction, quite casually turned the repugnant incident on its head when he blithely questioned why the lady had chosen to go out in the middle of the night?
The police in Pakistan isn’t known for efficiency of service. On the contrary, it has quite a reputation for being a refuge of criminals-friendly rogues and scoundrels who think their uniform gives them a license to abuse the people in the name of being watchdogs of their security.
But the callous, cold-hearted comments of the Lahore CCPO, that virtually pointed the finger at the victim of the rape and held her responsible for inviting that visitation upon her was a class act of an essential service, i.e. police, being totally divorced from reality.
No surprise that the ultra-insensitivity of the CCPO has invited swift and well-deserved condemnation, across the board, from an outraged intelligentsia dominating Pakistan’s social media. Calls from across the social media spectrum have demanded of the government to fire the callous CCPO and hold him accountable for his tentative sense of service to the people—a demand that IK has yet to address.
Outrageous as the chief cop’s off-the -cuff remarks maybe he was echoing the sentiment that rules the roost as far as the cultural mores of Pakistan’s male-dominated feudal society are concerned. Misogyny has been an endemic feature of this feudal system that has prevailed for centuries. Women are at best second-class denizens in this male-dominated, patriarchal, milieu. Their role has been defined and instilled in the hearts of women, in particular, as being there to serve their male species and carry out their orders without demur.
It’s unfortunate that in a supposedly democratic country like Pakistan, with its constitution loudly proclaiming that both genders, men and women, will have equal rights in its domain women have regularly been short-changed and denied their fundamental right of equality with their men-folk.
It isn’t surprising, at all, that women have had no luck in their quest for redressal of this appalling imbalance in their place in the social pecking order, because misogynist feudal culture also hogs the country’s political order. Legislative assemblies, at federal and provincial levels, have long been havens for feudal lords and their scions and minions. The same thread runs through the civil services, including, most importantly, the police.
So, Omar Sheikh, Lahore’s CCPO, was echoing the sentiment of his feudal class when he acerbically, and almost vicariously, held the woman gang-raped in front of her children responsible for her tragedy.
PM IK, in his aforementioned television interview seemed to favor exemplary punishment for rapists. He was of the opinion that a rapist should either be given capital punishment or castrated for good with the use of chemicals, as is the practice in some European countries.
IK, seeking to strike a common chord with the vibrant social media, apparently wants his sense of personal outrage to register on the minds of his people, particularly the social activists, that he was in their corner on this gruesome incident and wanted to turn things around. He has long been an ardent and vociferous advocate of a ‘New Pakistan’ where conventional moorings working against the interest of the common man are taken down for good.
His advocacy of change has been a welcome initiative for the younger generation of Pakistanis. However, his two-year track record in office doesn’t quite live up to his protestations of ‘change’ in a meaningful and substantive sense. What meets the eye to even a casual observer of the socio-political order under his administration is more of the same. Déjà vu is how any pundit would describe it.
IK’s party, PTI, claims to have changed the police culture in the province of KPK, where the party has been in power since 2013. It can give itself some wiggle room by insisting that in Punjab, it has been in power for only two years, which period may be insufficient to change—or impact in any substantive sense—the patriarchal and heavily-feudal mores of the country’s largest and most populous province.
Punjab, indeed, is a can of worms as far as its archaic, but deeply-entrenched, patriarchal feudal system is concerned. That medieval system—in which women are at a lower rung of society than men—is a case of double jeopardy for women because patriarchy is backed up to the hilt by an unenlightened clergy at the beck-and-call of their feudal lords.
To make matters worse, Punjab had been in the clutches of the bone-corrupt Sharif clan for well over a decade until IK’s PTI knocked them off their pedestal in 2018. But in the course of their long hold on all levers of power in Punjab, the notorious Sharif Brothers, Nawaz and Shahbaz, the police force of the province was totally abused, corrupted and won-over to the service of the Sharifs. They used the police force of Punjab and its officers as their bell-boys, to run errands for them and do their biddings without batting an eyelid.
Unconscionable officers, like CCPO Omar Sheikh, are specimen of police officers sold out to the Sharifs. The Model Town massacre of dozens of followers and aficionados of Tahirul Qadri, the Sharifs’ nemesis, is a text-book case of how the Punjab police was used by corrupt political leadership of the province to pull their chestnuts out of the fire.
The mission to turn around a police service long wedded to its colonial mentality of being masters of men and not their servants is a tough call for Imran Khan. But not subduing this beast isn’t an option for him. His political future would hang in the balance without it.
At the same time, the younger generations of Pakistanis will have to be disabused of this lethal mindset of male superiority and domination over their women. Education holds the key to such a transformation at the grassroots. That education should begin, now.
Yes, by all means, IK should bring in exemplary punishment for rapists, child molesters and all other kinds of criminals guilty of gender-based crimes. Pakistanis of all stripes and persuasions stridently insist that theirs is an Islamic State. So, every justification that the Islamic Republic of Pakistan should dispense justice and punishments according to the teachings of the Qur’an and the Sunnah of the Holy Prophet, PBUH.
The Islamic code of punishment allows no leniency for crimes against humanity. Raping a woman, or an innocent, under-aged girl is a heinous crime and an abuse of a woman’s human rights under any canon of laws. Let phony human rights advocates and self-serving NGOs—and their puny, brain-dead Pakistani intellectuals—cry themselves hoarse against capital punishment. But if IK is really concerned about gender-equality, as mandated in Islam and the Constitution of Pakistan’s Islamic Republic, he should ignore all and any alarm against capital punishment for rapists.
Let it begin with those beasts who defiled the sanctity of a mother in front of her children. They should be made a horrible example.
K_K_ghori@hotmail.com
(The writer is a former ambassador and career diplomat)