What’s in a name? Everything

On June 3, 2024, in the case of ‘Mehr Bano Langrial etc vs Federation of Pakistan’, the Lahore High Court ruled that the government must give women the option to retain their father's name on their CNIC and passport, regardless of marital status, within three months of the passing of the order.

Today is the last day of the three months of silence, with the government neither announcing a policy change nor agreeing to answer any questions about it. This is unsurprising for advocates like me who have been pushing for this policy change for over a year, only to be met with, at best, empty promises and, at worst, regressive proposals like adding ex-husbands’ names to a woman’s passport alongside the name of the current husband.

I was refused a renewal of my passport in May 2023 because I had opted to have my father’s name in the second line of my CNIC – essentially choosing to be identified as ‘daughter of’ rather than ‘wife of’. Although I had registered my marriage with NADRA as well as updated my Family Registration Certificate, the passport office said they could not process my application until I added the ‘husband’s name’ column to my CNIC. This was even though the NADRA chairman publicly announced in 2021 that Pakistani women could choose to retain their fathers’ names on their CNICs.

When my tweet about this refusal got considerable traction on X, government officials promised to amend the policy. Meanwhile, I received a call from the then director general of Immigration and Passports, who asked me what my issue was if I was “happily married”. In the months that followed, I was repeatedly assured that a policy change had been forwarded to the interior ministry and would shortly be approved. As is unfortunately the norm in Pakistan’s governance structures, nothing materialized.

Almost exactly a year later, I met Khadija Bokhari, a lawyer who had been advocating for this policy change through litigation and asked her to appear on Geo News to make the case on behalf of all of us on air. After her live segment, the new director general of passports was invited to present his side of the story. He decided to advocate for a different policy change: a new field should be added to divorced women’s passports that lists their ex-husbands. This would help border authorities confirm, he claimed, whether the woman had ever actually been married to the father of the children she was travelling with, and thus would help put an end to child trafficking.

A few weeks earlier, the same DG had called me as I had written an official letter to him and the Minister of Interior to advocate for the policy change. On the phone, his reasons for defending the current policy ranged from claiming that the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) required Pakistan to have the husband’s name field to citing “cultural factors”.

The crux of his argument was that to prevent child trafficking, border authorities needed to be sure a woman was actually the mother of the children who were travelling with her. Because the child’s passport listed only his or her father’s name, if the same name appeared as the husband’s name on the woman’s passport, they could be certain that the woman was in fact the mother.

When I asked why this information had to be printed and could not be machine-read, he claimed Pakistan couldn’t make backend data available to other countries. On the question of using birth certificates and FRCs to show this information to border agents, the DG dismissed these as local documents that have no standing internationally.

Just as the DG was sharing his proposal regarding adding ex-husbands’ names to women’s passports, it was announced on TV news that the Ministry of Interior had formed a committee to resolve the ongoing issue of married women’s passports. However, neither reporters nor I were able to find a notification afterwards that announced the formation of any such committee. After reaching out repeatedly to multiple individuals at the Ministry of Interior, it became clear that no one in the ministry was aware of this committee.

I anticipate that, if compelled to, the government today will reason that this policy change has been delayed beyond three months because as laid out in court already by the additional director of Immigration and Passports, the “column of the particulars of the passport need revision” and that “printing was required”. This explanation will be disingenuous because no reformatting or reprinting is required; passports for unmarried Pakistani women already exist as a format, and the government only needs to allow married women to use it too.

In a country like Pakistan, where we are fighting crises on a variety of fronts, my sustained advocacy on this issue is often met with the retort: focus on the bigger issues. I want to contend that this is a critical issue because it pertains to the supremacy of our constitutional freedoms and rule of law. When our government implements a policy on passports that is clearly in violation of a citizen’s rights to life (Article 9), dignity (Article 14) and equality (Article 25), and we in turn look the other way, we give the state further space to exact larger violations.

Not only do such policies say something about the state’s disregard for constitutional freedoms, but they also say something significant about how we view women in our society. If the Pakistani state only views women as an extension of the men in their lives, is it really any different from those who claim that a woman’s actions are responsible for a man’s honour? Why else would the state waste its scarce resources on making half of the country’s population change their identity documents halfway through life?

Hiding behind excuses like child trafficking, this policy remains just another way to keep Pakistani women ‘in their place’ in a country that ranks 145th out of 146 countries on the Global Gender Gap Index.

The writer is a projects officer at the Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and Transparency.