By Paaras Abbas

As she entered the packed lecture theatre, the audience rose in honour of the woman who had been dishonoured by being gang-raped and paraded naked in her village nine years ago. The Mukhtara Mai that addressed the audience at the School of Oriental and African Studies last week is a woman who has redefined the word honour, and is, according to Democracy Now, an international symbol for women’s rights in Pakistan.

For those who are not familiar with Mukhtara Mai’s case, it began in 2002 in the rural county of Jatoi of the Muzaffargarh District of Pakistan. The panchayat or tribal authority of the region ordered her to be gang-raped as a punishment of an alleged affair between her younger brother and a married woman from the influential Mastoi tribe. Men of the said tribe had in fact sodomized her brother, who was only twelve at the time, and concocted the story of the alleged affair as a cover-up, which led to Mukhtara Mai’s punishment.

It requires an extra-ordinary amount of courage to overcome the trauma of such an incident, to stand before an audience time and again and repeat the ordeal, in the face of constant humiliation at the hands of the people in her village and the then President of Pakistan alike. Over the last nine years, Mukhtara Mai has gone from a woman who wanted to end her life immediately after the incident, to a torchbearer in marches led by women seeking justice for such crimes. She has found a way to cope with the trauma of the incident, and is now married and has adopted a daughter who is turning three years old soon. With the support of her mother, she defied the norm and not only continued to live, but decided to devote her life to a cause. She built three schools, as well as a shelter for women, which includes facilities for psychiatric therapy and an emergency hotline.

When asked if she has received any support from the government or religious clerics, Mai stated that the government has given her nothing but false promises and further injustice, and after the initial support of a cleric in her village, who condemned the crime committed against her in one of his sermons, she has received no support from the religious community either. She never had any faith in the local police, and soon the expectations she had from the courts of law vanished as well.  After all, when the then President Pervez Musharraf can dismiss the outcry of rape victims as opportunism, why would the local authorities feel like they need to take such cases seriously? She filed an appeal after the latest verdict upon the insistence of her lawyer, but has no faith in the people who have the power to punish her attackers. And why would she? She met Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhary at a rally a few years ago and he assured her that one day they would both get justice. He got his share, but as Mai said ‘he forgot about the injustice done to a poor woman’.

Almost a decade has passed since Mukhtara Mai was stripped of her honour, but in these nine years she has come to redefine the word honour.  According to the President of the National Union of Pakistani Students and Alumni (who organised the event), she is a ‘flag bearer of social change’. When asked what has changed since she first spoke out in 2002, she replied that nothing has managed to feudal lords and nothing ever will - ‘Woh tou waderey hain, unn mein kahaan se (farq) aaye ga’.

However, although such crimes continue to take place, women now have the courage to speak out. She feels that injustice in Pakistan begins in the home, where there is a clear distinction between the treatment of male and female children. It is the mindset of the people that needs to be changed, which she tries to do at the schools she has built. She hopes to see Pakistani women working as officials in prisons, and judges in courts. She laughingly asked the female members in the audience to study law and eradicate the injustice prevalent in Pakistani prisons, where initially nobody bothered to take down details of her complaint, and the courts whose attitude towards her case has been negligent and flippant. She feels that before she was subjected to this tribulation, she would spend her time working in the field or on a piece of embroidery, sleep peacefully at night, and cry over petty family arguments. Now, after she decided to abandon the notion of suicide and resolved to devote her life to helping others, she has found a voice she hopes all women all over the world can attain.

A graceful, soft-spoken woman, with a great sense of humour and a delightful laugh, she adheres to her faith in God and in this faith finds comfort and hope for justice. She is truly the personification of the words strength and dignity, and has shown the world that it is important to remain steadfast in the face of adversity, and there is always something worth living for.