A veiled run for office: Pak polls open new doors for women in Balochistan

Next week's election in the restive province marks a small step forward for women in the region

With a pink dupatta draped around her shoulders and a black veil covering her head and face, Shumaila Ismail addresses a meeting inside a gated compound in Jinnah Town in Quetta. 

A member of the Central Committee of the left-leaning political outfit, the Balochistan National Party (BNP), Ismail is explaining to a group of veiled women what her party’s victory in next week’s general elections could mean for them. 

“Our party will work to end harassment against women and provide business and scholarship opportunities to you if we come into power,” she says in a confident tone. To make sure they cast their votes, she promises to arrange transportation for all the women who can’t visit polling stations on their own on July 25—the D-Day.

After years of bloodshed brought on by a separatist insurgency movement, normalcy is creeping back into Balochistan, Pakistan’s largest province by area and the smallest by population, and women have been the visible beneficiaries of it. 

They are out in large numbers, getting involved in canvassing for the first time in the region. This is a big step forward. In traditional Baloch culture, they are not supposed to participate in public events such as elections, but things are changing for good 

Sana Durrani, member of BAP

Ismail could be nominated to one of the seats reserved for women in the Baloch Assembly if her party wins 15 of the 51 seats in Wednesday’s election. There are 11 seats reserved for women in the provincial Assembly that are allocated to the nominees of political parties in proportion to the seats they have won. Ismail ranks third on the list of nominated women candidates from her party, which means her chances of bagging a seat are low. “Whether I make it to the Assembly or not does not matter to me, I will keep on working with same enthusiasm for my party,”she says.

One would expect her participation to face a backlash in a conservative society that insists on women covering their face, but Ismail says she has never faced any problem campaigning for her party. The setbacks have come from a different quarter. The terrorist attacks on a rally in Mastung on July 13th that killed 149 people have curtailed the scope of her party’s campaign. All large political gatherings were cancelled in the wake of the attack. The party has decided to donate the money that was to be spent on rallies to families of those injured or killed in the blast. Only small “corner meetings”, like the one addressed by Ismail, have been allowed as they are less likely to be the target of terrorists. They are women-only and inside gated compounds for extra security.

Zubeda Jalal, who is contesting from NA-271 Kech for National Assembly, is one woman candidate who has a good chance of winning. Jalal, who was born in Mand village in Kech in 1959, spent her initial years in Kuwait before returning to Quetta to complete her education from the University of Balochistan. In the late 1980s, she established a girl’s school in Mand in a show of defiance and courage. Girls going to school was still not acceptable in rural Balochistan. 

The success of her school brought her nationwide fame. In 1999, General Pervez Musharraf picked her as Education Minister in his cabinet. She contested the 2002 elections for the National Assembly from her home district and won, becoming a federal minister twice. 

A couple of months back, Jalal joined the newly formed Balochistan Awami Party (BAP). She has been fielded as the party’s candidate from NA-271,  a district that was badly affected by separatist insurgency in 2013. 

BAP is also seeking potential winners who could be its face in the future. One such person was introduced to public at a press conference on June 4. At the event, BAP General Secretary Manzoor Kakar welcomed a woman clad in a green and white salwar kameez and hoped she would be a blessing for the party. This woman was Sana Durrani, former chairperson of the Balochistan Women Business Association. Durrani, who is in her mid-30s, is a successful businesswoman and an entrepreneur who joined politics in Balochistan in the run up to the elections.

Durrani is not contesting elections this year, but is one of the most active women campaigners in the province. “If educated people do not enter politics, then they willingly allow the incompetent to rule over them, which I will not do anymore,” she says.

Another emerging face in Balochistan politics has made a name working for the region’s marginalised group, the Hazaras. An ethnic minority in Quetta, Hazaras have been regularly targeted by sectarian militants since 2002, due to their Shia faith. There have been suicide bomb attacks on their places of worship, markets and recreational centres and, according to the National Commission for Human Rights, 509 Hazaras have been killed in Quetta during the last five years. When Hazara shopkeepers were killed in May this year, for one women it was enough.

Jalila Haider, a lawyer and social activist, sat on an indefinite hunger strike outside the Quetta Press Club to demand justice for the Hazaras. She said she would end her strike only after assurances from Pakistan’s chief of army staff that the community would be protected. As her speeches went viral, within days 

Chief of Army Staff General Qamar Javed Bajwa visited Quetta and promised to lend protection to the community.

The success of the hunger strike made Haider a celebrity overnight, with many political parties approaching her to contest elections from Hazara neighbourhoods of Quetta.  She, however, turned down their requests.  “People would have said that I carried out the hunger strike just to increase my political stock,” she says. However, she doesn’t rule out joining politics at a later stage, when the time is right.

Change is surely and slowly trickling through Balochistan, but it has a long way to go. The indicators of participation of women in elections are not very promising.  Women comprise 47 per cent of the province’s 12.34 million population, according to the 2017 national census, but make up only 42 per cent of the registered voters. Of the 1,007 candidates contesting in the provincial Assembly elections, only 42 are women. For the National Assembly, the figure stands at 16 out of 303 candidates.

Political parties are still steeped in traditional mindsets. Most of the women contesting in next week’s elections do not stand a chance. They have been issued tickets only to comply with a recently implemented law that mandates political parties to allot 5 per cent  of their tickets to women. Most parties have nominated women to seats in regions where their chances of winning are dim. Ismail’s party colleagues Zeenat Shahwani and Shakila Naveed have been issued tickets from Pishin district of Balochistan where BNP has little to no presence.

Other parties have looked at women as compromise candidates. In Kohlu district, which is the epicentre of the Baloch insurgency, Pashtunkhwa Milli Awami Party, a Pashtun nationalist party, propped up a woman, Bachao Bibi, after it failed to arrive at a unanimous decision on its choice. Bibi doesn’t guarantee victory, but she does serve to unite the two warring factions of the party in Kohlu. A rank outsider and a housewife, she has let her husband campaign for her. Local journalists from Kohlu say that not even her pictures have been used on the party election banners.

The story is a similar one elsewhere. For the provincial Assembly constituency of PB-26 in the heart of Quetta, there are five women candidates in the fray. None, however, is in a position to win. Yet the doors have been opened up a bit for women, even if only reluctantly. 

Adnan Aamir is a journalist and researcher based in Quetta