A few days ago, in the sweltering silence of rural Balochistan, a woman was dragged before a jirga – a tribal court that has no legal standing but holds more power than any judge in the eyes of the people who obey it. Her crime? Daring to choose the man she wanted to marry.
The verdict? Death. She was shot point-blank. Not in the heat of passion. Not by a jilted lover. This was a sentence – calculated, endorsed, and executed with ritualistic authority. She died not for breaking a law, but for breaking character. For refusing to play the obedient, voiceless woman society expects her to be.
Meanwhile, in Islamabad, Parliament was having a very different conversation. A bill was passed to remove the death penalty for certain offences, one of which included stripping a woman in public. Law Minister Azam Nazeer Tarar argued that death was not a proportionate punishment for such a crime. And you know what? He’s right. Stripping a woman, as vile and dehumanising as it is, is not an attack on life. It’s a grotesque assault on dignity but not the kind that calls for a hangman’s noose.
But here’s where the hypocrisy stinks.
If stripping a woman doesn’t deserve the death penalty because it doesn’t take her life, then what exactly does a woman have to do to justify getting killed? Because apparently, in Balochistan, choosing your own husband meets the criteria. And that’s the problem. This country can debate legal semantics in air-conditioned rooms, but out there in the real State – the State of jirgas and guns and “honour” – a woman’s life is still negotiable.
The Penal Code might be evolving, but the soul of this country? Still stuck in a ditch where women’s bodies are battlegrounds, and autonomy is a death sentence.
The Pakistani state is in its “rebrand era.” There’s a visible push to make the Pakistan Penal Code look more progressive, or “human rights-centric,” as the buzzwords go. And on paper, it makes sense. We want to comply with international human rights norms. We want to show the world we’re shedding our barbaric past and embracing a more civilised legal framework. But let’s not delude ourselves: you cannot human-rights-ify a legal code when the people it serves are still clapping for murder in the name of honour.
The truth is: the law does not exist in a vacuum. You can soften the language of statutes, but it doesn’t soften the fists that beat women in their homes, or the bullets that end their lives in dusty fields. A law is only as good as the society willing to enforce it. And we? We’re not ready.
Our cultural DNA is hardwired to view women’s autonomy as rebellion. A woman who strips another of her dignity is a criminal but a woman who dares to own her dignity is a threat. That’s the contradiction we refuse to confront. And until we do, every amendment to the Penal Code is just lipstick on a corpse. A distraction. A performance.
Let’s be brutally honest for once. Pakistan doesn’t have a justice problem – it has a people problem. Laws can’t save you from a neighbour who believes your daughter’s choices are his business. They can’t save you from a jirga that thinks bullets are a legitimate form of community discipline. And they certainly can’t save you from the silence of a society that thinks “she brought it on herself.”
You want to remove the death penalty for public stripping? Fine. But while you’re at it, maybe consider adding consequences for the people who actually strip women of their agency. Maybe prosecute a jirga or two for murder. Maybe ask why women’s lives are still at the mercy of uneducated men with outdated codes of honour and easy access to weapons. Until then, spare us the speeches about justice. Because justice requires more than well-meaning legislation. It requires rage. It requires revolt. It requires a collective willingness to call out every rotten custom, every misogynistic whisper, every blood-soaked verdict disguised as ‘tradition’. The Penal Code might be evolving, but the soul of this country? Still stuck in a ditch where women’s bodies are battlegrounds, and autonomy is a death sentence.
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Courtesy – Dunya News
