Representation of the People (Amendment) Bill 2016, a draft law expected to be taken by a three-member subcommittee that seeks to increase women participation in the electoral process is a step in the right direction. The bill seeks to implement a gender-based segregation of polled votes and put a minimum requirement of 10 percent votes by women in any constituency for the election to be valid. If enacted, this legislation would increase women participation in the election process as in many areas of Pakistan women are not allowed to vote. Steeped in one of the most virulent forms of patriarchy, people in the Pakistan’s rural areas, for the most part, still believe that politics is an all-male sphere, thereby precluding even the possibility of women as a potential vote bank, let alone women as election candidates.
However, this deliberate disenfranchisement of women does not really match the value of women as productive members of society. This does not only take the form of household work, but even work on the field. Women in rural areas take part in various and, in some cases, all of the stages in farming along with cattle rearing and other supplementary work. This has particularly increased with the current high rates of urbanisation and the shift away from an agrarian-based economy. As men from villages are moving towards cities in search of better jobs, it is mostly women who stay back and take care of production on farms.
Nevertheless, this increased economic role of women in villages has not adequately translated itself into increased political rights for women. And part of the reason behind this state of affairs is that women are simply unaware of their rights. In an environment starting from their childhood and throughout their lives in which women are consistently told that they are inferior to men, their only role is to support their male family members, and in matters of politics only men have the cognitive ability to make wise decisions while women should blindly agree with whatever they decide it is no surprise that females have internalised these values of the patriarchal order, and have themselves become agents in its perpetuation.
