Pakistanis must challenge the routine prejudice that condemns an ancient transgender community to violence and ridicule

Mustafa Qadri
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 26 May 2010 18.30 BST

A great challenge for Pakistan has been crafting a sense of shared identity. But with much of the ensuing identity politics spiralling into sectarian and communal violence in recent decades, it isn’t surprising that minorities here face the worst forms of neglect and persecution.

There is no more maligned group of citizens in our country than those from its transgender community. Known variously as eunuchs, transgender or, in Urdu and Hindi, as hijras, they trace their origins to the pre-British royal courts of the Mughal empire and possibly even earlier, and are found not just in Pakistan but across the subcontinent. Under the Raj, the British tried to ban hijras as a breach of public decency but inevitably failed.

Although often described as eunuchs because some undergo castration, typically outside the clinical conditions of a hospital, many – if not most – do not.Hijras are in fact a diverse community of men (and some women) who happen to be hermaphrodites, transsexual, homosexual or have been castrated. Traditionally, hijras are viewed as having mystical powers – both good and bad – particularly with respect to marriage and fertility, which is why they are often found performing as dancers and soothsayers at weddings.

Sexuality is heavily regulated in Pakistan. Even for heterosexual couples relations are a hazardous affair, as brutally demonstrated by the recent murder of a British Pakistani family in Lahore last week – it is believed the murders were retribution for their son’s alleged infidelity. For queer and transgender Pakistanis, however, the risks are far more ubiquitous.

Today hijras are universally marginalised, forced to earn a living as beggars, prostitutes and dancers. It is common to see hijras asking for money at major traffic intersections and busy bazaars, yet, sadly, few of us ever know these people as family or friends. Because a high number work in the sex industry, hijras are, according to Family Health International, particularly vulnerable to STDs. They are also exposed to sexual abuse by customers. One young traditional male dancer I met in Islamabad recently, for instance, had his face brutally disfigured by acid when he refused advances from a male admirer at one of his performances.

Pakistan’s transgender community also faces persecution from the wider society. Brave activists like the She Male Association’s Almas Bobby criticise the police for routinely harassing members of the community, as demonstrated at a high-profile rally in the garrison city of Rawalpindi in January last year.

On Tuesday, police in Peshawar interrupted a wedding by arresting a businessman together with his “eunuch” bride and up to 43 guests. The couple had to be escorted by a heavy security detail to court to prevent onlookers from assaulting them. Although rare, this incident is not unique. In 2007, a couple were jailed for seeking to get married because the groom was a woman who had undergone sex-change surgery.

It should be no surprise that Tuesday’s arrest took place in a working-class neighbourhood of Peshawar. In Pakistan, the rich are generally free to do as they like. Although there are few recorded members of the transgender community among the elite, there is a vibrant if muted community of middle- and upper-class gay Pakistanis and one of the country’s most popular talkshows is hosted by a drag queen.

In a photographic exhibition in Islamabad this month, the Scottish photographer Malcolm Hutcheson shines a spotlight on this ancient community. “It is not that these individuals belong to the dark side of the society; rather it is society itself which is dark, where they tend to see them [hijras] as inferior and neglect them,” Hutcheson noted at the exhibition’s opening.

But along with the indignities they have faced, there has been progress towards respecting the rights of transgender Pakistanis as equal citizens. Last year Pakistan’s supreme court called on authorities to recognise hijras as a distinct gender that are entitled to inherit property, employment and to vote – albeit that these reforms will face stiff resistance in this deeply conservative country in which politicians are ever eager to display their Islamic credentials. In neighbouring India, a politician has suggested that a regiment of hijras should be established to act as security guards because of their “loyalty and integrity”.

Pakistani society is immensely diverse, but with an all-too-often monolithic and intolerant mainstream conception of national identity it is frighteningly easy to face extreme prejudice and violence. Rather than expressing outrage over images of the Prophet on networking sites, it is high time we, as Muslims and Pakistanis, challenge the routine prejudice that condemns our fellow citizens to a lifetime of violence and ridicule. Accepting the ancient hijra community as a legitimate and diverse part of our society would be a welcome start.

[This article was published in The Guardian. Url: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/26/pakistan-transgender-hijras-deserve-acceptance]

Already ravaged by high inflation, massive energy shortages and political turmoil, Pakistan has been shocked by bombings in most of its major cities, writes Mustafa Qadri

Pakistan is enduring the most brutal spate of political violence since the Punjab-dominated Army was implicated in mass slaughter in 1971. Despite military victories in large swathes of the tribal areas that are home to the Taliban, Pakistan’s major cities have been rocked by an escalating series of violent events that, according to one estimate, have claimed 544 lives in a little under three months.

Where once the bombings were primarily concentrated in or near the tribal areas, such as the cities of Peshawar and Dera Ismail Khan, these recent bomb blasts and shootings have hit several of the largest cities in the country.

The bombings of the two biggest cities of the Punjab, the most populous and influential of Pakistan’s provinces — Lahore in May and Multan earlier this month — are a sign of this shift. The carnage in Multan was followed by an attack on a mosque in a heavily fortified part of Rawalpindi where many Army personnel traditionally gather for Friday prayers. This last attack left 40 dead, including a major-general and 16 children of senior military officers.

This was the second major attack on Rawalpindi, the city which houses the headquarters of Pakistan’s Army, in as many months. In October, militants attempted to breach Army headquarters, leading to a 22-hour siege and hostage crisis that badly humiliated the country’s senior generals.

The Taliban hail from the remote and poorly developed tribal areas along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, and not from the big cities. This makes claims that they are responsible for these recent bombings all the more destabilising for Pakistan — but it also has many here querying whether the Taliban actually is responsible for the well coordinated attacks.

Pakistan’s media, religious groups and government authorities rarely use the term “Taliban” when discussing the current violence. That is because in Pakistan the Taliban are still associated with the anti-US resistance in neighbouring Afghanistan. There is also a widespread perception that the Taliban regime in Afghanistan that existed before the US-led invasion of 2001 was, although perhaps theologically primitive, an honest political broker that provided the troubled central Asian nation with an unprecedented level of stability and promoted the virtues of Islam.

For observers in the West this may sound absurd. But a little over two decades ago, Islamist militants waging what they considered a holy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan were called “freedom fighters” by then US President Ronald Reagan, (not to mention by Rambo).

For many in Pakistan, the Afghan Taliban inherited the mantle of freedom fighters from the conflict in the 1980s. While the Pakistan security establishment has retained informal links with Afghan Taliban commanders and their allies after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US, for their part, the Afghan Taliban has largely avoided the anti-Pakistan insurgency.

Noting this distinction, retired civil and military officials contacted by newmatilda.com say they are sceptical about Taliban involvement in the bombings inside Pakistan. They blame foreign governments, particularly India, the United States and Israel for the current violence.

According to Pakistan Interior Minister Rehman Malik, the senior civilian bureaucrat charged with counterterrorism activities, India is responsible for much of the terrorism.

This claim was echoed by intelligence officials interviewed by newmatilda.com in the national capital of Islamabad and Peshawar, the largest and strategically important city on Pakistan’s northwest frontier. Mufti Zubair Usmani from the Jamia Darul Uloom, in Karachi, the largest mainstream religious seminary in the country, says the Pakistan Taliban “is an instrument of RAW [the Research and Analysis Wing of the Indian Prime Minister’s Office, one of India’s top spy agencies] … Whoever is doing things in Pakistan is doing it to defeat Pakistan [which] happens to be in a strategic location [and] an atomic power. Because of this, the violence will continue.”

Provincial and federal intelligence officials interviewed by newmatilda.com privately deliver remarkably similar conclusions, citing secret intelligence from the interrogation of captured Taliban operatives and other sources that suggest Indian and Afghan government involvement.

Adding intrigue to this already confusing situation, the Pakistan Taliban tends to deny responsibility for some of the bombings, especially those that kill high numbers of civilians. They have even blamed the private military contractor Blackwater, now known as Xe Services, and Pakistan’s own intelligence agencies for the most devastating attacks while taking responsibility for those that target the military.

Both the Army and the Taliban claim to fight in the name of Islam  so blaming foreigners and avoiding the more sobering and likely reality that Muslim Pakistanis are killing one another helps both sides rally popular support.

It’s little help in this volatile environment for the US to be openly speaking of escalating its highly destabilising drone war inside Pakistan. Last week, at least 15 people were killed by an American drone assault on a suspected military compound on the border with Afghanistan.

Powerless to control the spiraling violence, it is no wonder that many Pakistanis are convinced that foreigners, and not the Taliban, are the greatest source of instability in their country.

Source URL: http://newmatilda.com/2009/12/22/who-behind-violence-pakistan