BY FASIH AHMED
It is no coincidence that Sherry Rehman’s
mango-coloured, Raj-era house in Karachi’s Old Clifton sits close to
Fatima Jinnah’s. Like the sister of Pakistan’s founding father, Sherry –
whose westernised diminutive is derived from Shehrbano, a classical
Persian name that means “princess” – has devoted her life to her
country. As a journalist, author and (for a decade now) politician, the
elegant 50-year-old has seen and suffered violence without yielding to
the temptation of an easier life.
It has been a bleak year so far for Pakistan, even by
its own harrowing standards. Salmaan Taseer, governor of the Punjab, was
assassinated by his own fanatical security guard in January and
minorities minister Shahbaz Bhatti, the only Christian in Pakistan’s
government, was gunned down in early March by the Punjabi Taliban. Like
them, Rehman has urged a review of the country’s blasphemy laws to
prevent their misuse. Like them, Rehman had stood up for protecting
minorities as well as vulnerable Muslims in Pakistan. Last November,
after Taseer took up the cause of Aasia Noreen, a Christian mother of
five sentenced to death for blasphemy, Rehman put forth a bill in
Parliament to amend the controversial laws.
The jihadists were outraged by Rehman’s move. She was
anathematised at high-octane Islamist rallies and burnt in effigy. A
cleric at a major mosque in an army-run neighbourhood in her home town
of Karachi issued a fatwa declaring her wajib-ul-qatl, or
fit to be killed. The Tanzeem-e-Islami, an organisation devoted to an
“Islamic renaissance through the revolutionary process”, pamphleteered
against her for “provoking the religious honour of the Muslims of
Pakistan”. A lawsuit in Lahore seeks her dismissal from Parliament. The
charges against her are outlandish but passions in Pakistan are running
dangerously, even insanely, high.
“That call to emotion, ‘if you’re not with us then
you’re not really a good Muslim’, instils fear in many hearts,” said
Rehman in an interview with Newsweek at her house where she lives
with her daughter, husband and mother. “It has rattled the religious
right that many of us have read chapter and verse of the Koran, as well
as the sayings of the prophet, and we make our arguments in Parliament
and on television on the basis of that.” She is well versed in Islam but
does not wear her faith on her sleeve as many women in public life here
are expected to as proof of their piety and domesticity. Ultimately, she
says, there will have to be a new middle ground.
“There has to be a much more tolerant Pakistan because
everyday issues are sweeping up people’s lives and those everyday issues
are structured in inequalities that are getting more and more aggravated
and deep. And when that happens, your passions inflame much easier.” The
religious right has used Pakistan’s social fragmentation to inflame
passions on issues that are framed in religious or theological terms in
order to control the political agenda. “It’s not as if Pakistan does not
have major structural and economic problems, and we really need to focus
on those in the days ahead,” she says.
Rehman, who has largely been keeping to her Karachi home
because of the security threat, met with Bhatti at the National Assembly
a week before his assassination. “He was understandably very upset and
frustrated. He said he was going to go to Lahore and address issues of
religious intolerance at public meetings but the Raymond Davis issue had
added to the flames in the street,” she says, referring to the CIA
contractor on trial for killing two Pakistani men. “He knew that
blasphemy and anti-Americanism have become one deliberate and
unfortunate conflation and that was not good for anyone.”
Bhatti was killed on March 2 in Islamabad outside his
mother’s house. His assassins have warned that they will target other
members of the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party – whose ideology preaches a
tolerance that is derided by its critics as secularism, a word that
carries an increasingly pejorative charge in Pakistan. Speaking in
Parliament the day after Bhatti’s assassination, interior minister
Rehman Malik identified the targets that the Tehreek-e-Taliban have in
their sights. “I am at No. 1, Sherry is at No. 2 and Fauzia Wahab [an
MP] is at No. 3,” he said. “Next time you may not find me here,” he
added.
Precautions would seem to make sense. In February 2007
Rehman was hospitalised after being attacked at a rally in Karachi
against General Pervez Musharraf, then president of Pakistan. Three
months later, she was caught in an ambush when Musharraf loyalists
opened fire in various parts of the city to disrupt a protest against
the sacking of the country’s chief justice, an opponent of Musharraf.
The clashes claimed at least 42 lives. That October she survived the
attack on former prime minister Benazir Bhutto’s homecoming procession
in Karachi – at 136 dead, this was Pakistan’s most brutal suicide
bombing. She was also at the Liaquat Bagh rally on December 27, 2007 in
Rawalpindi when Bhutto was assassinated. “Those kinds of experiences,
the kind of fire you walk through, sharpen your resolve to at least stay
centred,” says Rehman. It was Bhutto who persuaded Rehman to join her
Pakistan Peoples Party. “One day she rang me in London and said:
‘Sherry, have you registered your vote?’ I said: ‘Of course. Do I look
like a non-voter to you?’” When they met in London, Bhutto asked her to
accept a party seat in the Senate. “She was a force of nature. How could
you ever say anything but yes to her?”
In 2002 Rehman became one of 60 women who had seats
reserved in Parliament, the result of an affirmative action initiative
to enhance the woefully small number of female legislators. “I think it
revolutionised the discourse,” she says of the reserved seats. “It’s
women who always tackle the difficult, head-on challenges – always the
women.” Rehman is not one to shy away from a good challenge. As a
legislator, she has often had to reach across the aisle to push for laws
against domestic violence and sexual harassment and for amendments to
the country’s rape laws which stack the deck against the victims. “In
the last assembly, I was constantly battling women’s issues,” she says.
“The main work I do is national security. That doesn’t usually draw this
kind of controversy; it’s safe work.” Jinnah Institute, the think tank
she founded in 2000, focuses on regional peace and security matters.
When Rehman became the country’s first woman information
minister in March 2008, she introduced a bill to remove restrictions
placed on the media during the last days of the Musharraf regime, and
she has authored a Right to Information Bill that will force greater
official transparency if signed into law. She made an in camera
presentation on national security to a joint session of Parliament; this
was novel in a country where women, who make up almost half the
country’s population of 180 million, are almost never taken seriously on
security matters. In April 2009 she made an impassioned plea urging
Parliament not to abandon the northern district of Swat to the Taliban.
The appeasement of the Taliban backfired, as she had feared it would.
The army had to be sent in and the military operation to flush the
Taliban out of Swat created the world’s largest population of internally
displaced persons.
Through it all Rehman kept her party colleagues on
message and maintained her cool despite provocations from opposition
MPs, news anchors and smear campaigns through anonymous mass text
messages. Rehman was one of President Asif Ali Zardari’s closest
advisers and for most Pakistanis an important face of his government.
After she resigned from office in March 2009 (in protest against the
government’s disruption of TV channels critical of it), she was also
removed as her party’s information secretary. Now, after the recent
assassinations, the party has pulled together. “The PPP is still the
most tolerant party for women and minorities and at times when Pakistan
faces serious crises, we stand by each other,” says Rehman. The
government is providing security cover to her.
In Karachi, Rehman is now deluged with visitors
concerned for her safety, many of them begging her to leave the country.
“It already bothers me that I’m not at the rallies and the vigils. The
least I can do is not walk away from this,” she says. “What is a life
worth living? What is there left for me to protect forever? If I go
away, I’ll always be anxious about what I did, what is happening at home
and what I left behind.”
But things may already be changing. Conservatives like
ex-prime minister Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain and cricketer turned
politician Imran Khan share Rehman’s position that the abuse of the
blasphemy laws must be prevented. Maulana Fazl-ur-Rehman of the orthodox
Sunni Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, a former coalition partner, also seems to
have come around. “This is not about constitutionalism or secularism,
this is about having laws that conform to the Koran,” says Sherry.
“Injustice is not something we need to show tolerance for.”
The narrative of lost hope, she says, is a tired one.
“We will not be able to turn back the tide of militancy with only
military means. Extremism will have to be challenged now, especially
when it takes a murderous turn. Pakistan must not be allowed to turn
into a country where a person is killed for their beliefs. This is not
who we are, either as citizens or Muslims.”
With Anam Mansuri in Karachi and Jahanzeb Aslam in
Lahore.
