What role female members of PTI will play for women rights?

It was a hot day in mid-July when Salman Sufi found out that he had been fired. Until then, Sufi had been a senior member of the Punjab chief minister’s Special Monitoring Unit, where he had, among other things, developed and implemented the Punjab Protection of Women Against Violence Act in 2016. The law was controversial, not least because it allowed for speedy hearings on cases, made special provisions for the development of women’s shelters, expedited procedures that allowed for the removal of abusive men from homes, and sought to implement GPS tracking of abusers. The country’s ruling party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), was committed to getting the reforms through in the province of Punjab, and Sufi was there to help it do so.

The days before the bill was finally passed in 2016 were difficult ones for Sufi; religious hard-liners fired shots at his house. At the last minute, male members of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), the political party of the former cricket star Imran Khan, walked off the assembly floor, refusing to vote for the legislation. The women of the party stayed, in protest. Later, when the vote was called, the men never returned. In the words of one female lawmaker, the men “feel they are being plotted against.” Still, the bill passed.

Sufi, who had drafted the original legislation, was relieved when it passed in Punjab.

Somewhere in the process, he had approached Khan, the PTI’s chairman, hoping to convince him to introduce similar legislation in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, the province where Khan’s party controlled the government. According to Sufi, Khan seemed reluctant. Then, instead of moving the legislation forward, he referred it to the Council of Islamic Ideology, an advisory body of religious scholars. Muhammad Khan Sherani, the head of the council, declared the law against the “spirit of Islam” because husbands are permitted to “lightly beat” their wives.

In the years after the bill’s passage, Sufi focused on its implementation in Punjab as an unpaid volunteer. He opened shelters and established the Women Protection Authority and even introduced gender violence as a topic in the high school social studies curriculum. When he learned of his firing on July 15, 10 days before the general election, he was shocked.

These were tumultuous days in Pakistan; a little over a week earlier, on July 6, a court in Islamabad had found Pakistan’s deposed prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, and his daughter Maryam Nawaz Sharif guilty of graft. The decision to fire Sufi was made just a few days later. On July 13, both Sharifs were arrested and thrown in prison. Although Nawaz’s brother, Shahbaz — the CM in Punjab province—would still contest the elections, it was clear that the PML-N could not recover.

When Pakistanis voted on July 25, Khan’s PTI came out ahead, paving the way for him to become prime minister. A day after the polls, Khan declared victory, promising to create a country in the image of Medina, the first Islamic city-state, governed by the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) in the seventh century.

For the 2018 elections, his party selected just six women to run, barely meeting the 5 percent quota that the Election Commission of Pakistan required of all parties to compete in the election. Only two of them won, as opposed to 114 PTI men.

There is some hope. One of the two women elected was 33-year-old Zartaj Gul, a political newcomer, who unseated a longtime feudal candidate belonging to a powerful clan. Campaigning tirelessly, Gul held five or six events per day in the last days before the election. Her husband, Akhwand Humayun Raza, ran for a provincial seat from the same constituency, and the two regularly campaigned together.

In Punjab, there is a PTI woman who does have political experience and the clout needed to actually make a difference. Yasmin Rashid, a longtime activist and leader, lost her national assembly seat but did manage to win her Punjab provincial assembly seat in a close race. There was even speculation that she could become the PTI candidate for chief minister of Punjab. After the election, an informal social media campaign pushed her candidacy, with many people declaring support.

Finally, there is Shireen Mazari, one of the most vocal and visible women in the PTI and one of Khan’s closest advisors. Mazari is a longtime supporter of the Pakistani military and a fixture in Khan’s immediate circle. She has even defended him against allegations of sexual harassment. Last year, Mazari addressed an all-women press conference in which she refuted then-National Assembly member Ayesha Gulalai’s allegations that Khan had been sending inappropriate text messages and had propositioned her. Calling the charges a “disrespect to all PTI women,” Mazari branded Gulalai an “opportunist.”