Gilead in the making: Violence against women in Pakistan and India
Written by Zainab Amanullah
Photo by Joe Flood / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
*Content warning: This article contains mentions of sexual violence*
Years back I read about Margaret Atwood’s dystopian Republic of Gilead as a horrifying premonition that I fervently hoped against. I prayed that those words never translated into reality, that her story remained a fictional cautionary tale for us all and nothing more. But the Gilead she predicted is upon us. We are Offred, being offered without question or justice, and with cruelty to satisfy the brutal and insatiable thirst of self-entitled, unrepentant, lawless and deformed sons of our states. Welcome to a modern-day Gilead, a patriarchal nightmare long in the making, finally reaching its dreadful zenith. Made by men, for men. Ruled by them, for them.
Zahid Jaffer, the son of a wealthy Pakistani businessman, one day decided to play the supreme authority and ended the life of 27-year-old Noor Mukadam, who was found brutally murdered at his home in Islamabad. Jaffer acted secure with the arrogance of knowing he’d be protected no matter what, and wasn’t disappointed—though sentenced to death in February 2022, the courts have yet to act on the verdict. Her murder sparked a worldwide outcry, along with speculations that he will get off the hook using his family’s influence and power. But some still found ways to make Mukadam the accomplice in her own brutal demise, replying on their same century-old arguments: “Why was she at his home? What was she doing there at that hour?” And “how did she know him?” As if these questions mattered in the face of the heinous crime committed by Jaffer.
Imran Ali, a beastly predator, had struck repeatedly until innocent six-year-old Zainab Ansari became his last victim. She was raped, tortured and strangled; her savage and untimely death angered Pakistan’s public enough to snap the authorities out of five days of inaction after she was reported missing.
Mukesh Singh, Vinay Sharma, Pawan Gupta, Akshay Thakur, Ram Singh and Mohammed Afroz believed it was their birthright to inflict unimaginable pain on Jyoti ‘Nirbhaya’ Singh in her gang rape and murder that took place aboard a bus in Delhi in 2012. It gained international attention, inspiring the films Nirbhaya and India’s Daughter, and spurring others to take it upon themselves to eradicate the root cause of these brutalities, including the creation of the non-profit Think Equal by India’s Daughter director Leslee Udwin. See, we remember—the names, the crimes, the outcry, the silence, the justifications and the injustice. We remember it all.
No accountability and the culture of victim-blaming
This is a parody of humanity invented especially for our gender, where we thank wholeheartedly that today we were only stared at, only cat-called in front of the complicit public, and only touched by their disgusting hands. Because we all know it could be so much worse. It is a twisted, lesser grade of citizenship that has been handed over to us, where neither the law nor the narrative, neither public support nor justice is on our side. Where if we live, we are blamed and in our deaths we are criticised. Where we are the sole perpetrators of the violence against us, we are the reason for the instigation of such brutalities against our bodies. Society concludes with ease that we invite barbaric acts against ourselves.
In The Handmaid’s Tale, protagonist Offred chillingly recounts that, “Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance… Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.” For years now, life-threatening patterns have emerged around us that we have grown desensitised to. The filthy stares of our brothers, the demeaning comments of our fathers, the sexist remarks of our sons, our colleagues who harm, our friends who perpetuate this and the men we have failed to hold accountable. These small, not so inconsequential acts aren’t isolated but they manifest a deeper, more pervasive issue. They empower their sense of entitlement, attesting to their destructive thoughts, that as men they have self-inherited authority over women. Emboldened by a lifetime of impunity, in their own worlds they are untouchable, free to joke, harass, catcall, touch, beat, rape and kill. Because as men they have been allowed to get away with such behaviour all their lives.
And what have we handed over to our women? They have been force-fed avoidance as a survival tactic, taught to turn a blind eye, silence their screams, question their own integrity and compromise for the sake of society. Silence and suffering, that is what our daughters have inherited from our societies. We are complicit in this and we can’t look away. For far too long we have driven the narrative of keeping our women inside for their safety while we raise uncontrollable monsters who wreak havoc in society— and we must acknowledge this.
The normalisation of violence against women
The women of India and Pakistan, and across the world, have learned to live their lives with the horrifying details of what their future could be. We are overburdened with too many examples, too many hashtags. Their faces reflect us. Our experiences echo through their stories; it’s just them today, but we know it could be us tomorrow. This is the world we live in—with constant reminders of what could happen.
The truth is that violence against women in both these countries has been normalised to a painful extent. It has been accepted as a by-product of a distorted societal construct that allows men to continue living peacefully and happily after committing such monstrous crimes. As a nation, we have failed our daughters completely. We have instilled fear in them, cautioning them, restricting them while allowing our sons to carry on this vicious cycle of cruelty. We have not taught our sons the repercussions of their actions. We don’t banish them publicly nor do we punish them for their sins. We don’t hold them accountable for their crimes, always providing escape routes and safe havens, while we teach our daughters to endure in the name of honour and forgiveness, to forsake and forget for society. As a nation, we have taken our daughter’s obedience for granted.
In The Handmaid’s Tale the protagonist warns us, “There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated… but they were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of them were the men we knew. The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable.”
What the women in the protagonist’s world failed to realise, we shouldn’t. Take it as a warning, a lesson or a sneaking suspicion: we are the people who aren’t in the newspaper yet. We haven’t been reduced to hashtags yet. And that’s where we are living right now— between those ‘yets.’
Gilead: A warning to not look away
Our efforts are not being translated into plausible actions. The culture of violence against women begins by ignoring the problematic beliefs young boys have—their harmless jokes, the never-ending victim blaming, the insidious narrative of “boys will be boys”. These attitudes lead to degrading women, making them less human, more object. When they aren’t stopped for their words, they invariably think it’s okay to stalk, to touch inappropriately, to treat women as their own property. All the while demeaning women’s status and reaching the barbaric end of inflicting violence.
There is no one solution, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a solution at all. Our absence in rooms where laws are passed and decisions are made has been impacting our lives for far too long. Not enough has been done to put a stop to this barbarity that hangs as a sword of uncertainty on our lives. Atwood has used her protagonist to warn us about what can happen if we don’t stand up as one for our rights. Her Gilead is a bedtime tale cautioning us not to look away. That nightmarish, regressive society has sadly come to life in our countries.
On August 9th, a second year postgraduate trainee in Kolkata was raped and murdered. A few days before, demonstrations took place in Lahore following the alleged rape of a five-year-old. Pakistan and India celebrated their independence on 14th and 15th August respectively. But for millions of women residing in these countries, what is there for them to celebrate? What freedom should they cheer for?
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