PESHAWAR, Mar 7 (IPS) - Saeeda Anwar is a 38-year-old Pakistani schoolteacher. She works in a school here in the capital of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), but she is not allowed to exercise her franchise.
"My family is strictly against women voting. They don’t like us to vote. Although, I am allowed to work as a teacher because I give them all my salary," she says of the male members of her family.
Patriarchy is deeply embedded in the NWFP. The Pakistan government has neither been able to implement modernising programmes nor Article 34 of the Pakistan Constitution (1973) that says ‘steps shall be taken to ensure full participation of women in all spheres of national life’.
Here women are banned from participation and decision-making -- a tribal feudalism almost as rigid as in adjacent Afghanistan under the Taliban. It is the men who decide who their women can talk to or whether they can go out of the house, also who their daughters should marry and when.
Yet, 15 women challenged political exclusion and contested the Feb. 18 polls to parliament and the national assembly from the NWFP. Not one won, and polling by women, both in the province and in the neighbouring Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), was once again the lowest in Pakistan.
Continued . . .
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