Without votes

For reasons which are difficult to understand, and even harder to explain, some 50,000 women in the federal capital, Islamabad, are being denied National Identity Cards by Nadra. This would mean that, with elections coming up, the women are deprived of their right to vote. Representatives of civil society organisations, women counsellors and other stakeholders are attempting to find solutions. The problem appears to involve women who moved to Islamabad from other towns, villages or cities in Pakistan many years or even decades ago and married in Islamabad. Nadra is demanding that they prove their identity and their status as Pakistani citizens. This is particularly hard for women whose parents are no longer alive or who have no closer relatives living in Islamabad. B-forms have also been denied to the children of these unfortunate couples, despite the existence of marriage certificates and the CNICs of husbands.

The Pattan Development Organisation has said that it has been able to identify over 4,000 such women in Islamabad and that part of the problem also stems from the fact that a large number of men do not want their wives and daughters to hold CNICs. The importance of the identity documents being available to women is part of the campaign led by Pattan. Women councillors are working to identify women in need of ID cards. According to the Election Commission, there are 730,000 voters in Islamabad, with the gap between female and male voters standing at around 50,000. For voting purposes, and also for the conduct of day-to-day life, the problem needs to be resolved urgently. According to human rights groups, there is already a discrepancy of some 12 million between the number of male and female voters. Every effort needs to be made to rectify this and also change a situation in which women have, on the basis of relatively trivial reasons, been denied identity documents alongside their children causing immense suffering for many of them.