While it makes only a small dent, the Women's Protection Bill (WPB) casts the first stone at undoing  the many  draconian laws invented by Ziaul Haq. It took 27 long years, five governments and seven years for the incumbents to even begin the undoing process. Clearly in the business of law, demolition is far more cumbersome  than construction. 

The WPB  removes a major chunk  of injustice from the hugely unjust and unwarranted Hudood ordinance, which should have ideally seen the door soon after Zia's departure. But far more than protection to women, the bill would be remembered for exposing the conflicts and controversies that characterise our society.  It is a sad tribute to our tolerance of injustice.  We tolerated for three decades, cruelty and punishment to thousands of our women.  We tolerated for a life time the premise that only a bunch of semi-illiterate "Ulema" has the right to interpret divine laws. We also chose to remain silent when those seeking God's protection in every alternate sentence, suddenly reverse their role  and  form an association (Tahaffuz Hadoodullah), to protect  the  divine frontiers. Certainly the Lord  is not banking on  MMA's  protection to keep His system running.

The WPB is at best a bill, and not a pill or a panacea.   It has done what a piece of paper could do.  It removes an intentionally built-in lacuna - and to that extent it is highly welcome. But not putting a woman in jail once she has been raped, is by itself no great act of  justice.  We need to keep the WPB in its correct perspective and focus on the real issue of providing justice and empowerment and not merely protection to women.  

Now that we have a  WPB in our  law books, how does it  get justice for  a raped woman, beyond  not landing her in  jail.  Does the WPB make it any easier for her to report the rape case?   Does it simplify the registration of an FIR?  Does it facilitate her medical examination? Does it expedite a laboratory report?  Does it make justice any more accessible or quicker?  The answer to all these questions is  a simple NO.  

So all that will happen is that a raped woman will not go to jail but would still have the same harassment of procedures and the same impossibility of getting justice.  With the 300 million dollar "Access to Justice" loan already blown up on acquisition of electronic gadgetry, there is not even a chance of  an improved 'access' in the days to come.  The still outstanding cases of even high profile cases like  Mukhtaran Mai and Shahzia Khalid, speak volumes of our hollow, inadequate and unkind justice  system.

We as citizens need to demand and struggle for a very basic cause.    Empowerment and justice to women in an easy, helpful  and dignified manner. The first step is to let every girl child  feel the chair and desk of a class room. What protection can a system provide to its women where the female literacy rate is a dismal 38% and only 24% girls  manage to get enrolled in  secondary schools? The government finds no embarrassment in  admitting  that there are 7500 closed schools in the province of Sindh alone.  Let us discover such thousands of  lost schools all over, and open them for the girl children of  Pakistan. The educated women of Pakistan will perhaps have a better chance to seek justice for themselves.  

Our next struggle could be to demand  specific actions to provide easy and efficient   FIR , medical examination, Lab testing and court  processes to a rape victim. We are rich enough to indulge  in such wasteful expenditures like spending  Rs. 320 million on a  decorative water fountain in Karachi and Rs. 360 million on a Provincial Assembly building in Peshawar (whose special gift to womankind is a Hisba Bill). But we have no money (or inclination) to build dedicated women support centres in every town and city of Pakistan.  These centres could be equipped with medical examination facility, Lab facility, a female doctor and a female police officer.  It could receive any complaint from a woman,  lodge an FIR and provide efficient and dignified support to rape survivors and other women complainants. 

This process could then be extended to courts.  Can  the  courts be bound to dispose off rape cases in a fixed time period of a few weeks?  War Against Rape, an NGO working for the cause of rape survivors  reports that out of 72  rape cases that they pursued in the past 3 years, only one came to  see a  judicial conclusion.  The murderer of Fauzia Bhutto is free and back in business, because the deceased's family could not  pursue and keep visiting the courts for 17 long years.  What is needed is less painful, less time-consuming  and less burdensome justice. Unfortunately  no protection bills and no foreign loans will deliver this.  The government must get to the real problem, come down from the Constitution Avenue and walk through the unfriendly police stations and dusty district courts to see what is really needed by the women of Pakistan. 

- This article by Naeem Sadiq was published by Asian American Network Against Abuse of Human Rights (ANAA) on its newsletter.