Veena Malik

Source: thefridaytimes.com

Bravo Veena Malik! Pakistan’s women are amongst the most forthright and reasoned in the world, but it takes a particular spark to go in full flight against a mullah

An old friend as a little girl in Lahore would be told when she was sitting half way up a tree that if she continued to climb she would in punishment be ‘sent to Timbuctoo’. Thirty five years later and with two children of her own and her husband posted to Nigeria, she decided to take the bull by the horns and insisted they went off to Mali to see what Timbuctoo was all about. In fact it was ‘very interesting’ and had a ravishing library. Since I once joined her on a trip to India and was never able to keep up her pace, I know that obstacles weren’t something she saw as anything more than mild molehills to the destinations she had set her intentions on.

If there has been a bit of a shortage of Gohar Shads, Razia Sultanas, Zenobias and the army of amazons who used to guard Osman Ali Khan’s palace in Hyderabad in modern times, something very interesting turned up in an account I was reading of the history of the Black Sea by Neal Ascherson. Ascherson worked for the Observer and then the Independent as a correspondent. In August 1991 he found himself, entirely by chance, on a tour of archaeological ruins in Crimea. Something was afoot. Down on the coast at Foros, the reformist president Mikhail Gorbachev was holidaying with his family. The old guard was plotting to strike and overthrow him.

Ascherson flew to Moscow, where Boris Yeltsin, Gorbachev’s number two, was under tank siege in the Russian parliament building. Around the parliament to Ascherson’s amazement, was a chain of women, holding hands, as a cordon of protection.

They had simply had enough. Just as the Soviet Union was waking up from a long sleep of repressive communism and taking its first steps back into the world, its perestroika (economic reform) and glasnost (openness) was threatened by the return of the old guard and their geriatric leaders. The women, sick of thirty years of food shortages and the utilitarian greyness of Soviet life, had taken matters into their own hands. When Ascherson asked them why they stood there and why they were not afraid, they answered: ‘Because we are mothers.’ Their vigil in the rain, supported by husbands and brothers who brought thermos flasks of tea and sandwiches, lasted for two days; on the third day the plotters melted away. A tiny segment of Russia’s modest and small liberal-minded middle class had swung the pendulum of history.

How extraordinary that is. The more so since the UK has not been doing so well in its equalities over the last few years. Eighty years after universal franchise, women MPs form only a fifth of the House of Commons at 22 per cent. In their working lives generally women earn 13 per cent less than men for the same jobs over a lifetime. They find it difficult to get their particular skills of straightforwardness, intelligence and practicality through what is called the ‘glass ceiling’; much more so than in Pakistan or India where the term isn’t in use. The promise of equality for women which seemed so concrete in the 1980s appears to have ebbed away.

Enter Baroness Boothroyd, retired Speaker of the House of Commons, now 81 years of age who stated on the national broadcaster that the current Speaker, John Bercow, wasn’t doing his job properly and wasn’t respected in the House. Short of a grasp of constitutional affairs? Unable to maintain parliamentary impartiality? No, she said. Speaker Bercow wasn’t properly dressed. After 700 years of tradition, he had dispensed with the traditional dress of long socks, dark breeches, waistcoat, white cuffs and collar and wore lounge suits.

There are very few daggers you can throw at a man’s heart more piercing that that he isn’t properly dressed. Wearing the right clothes for the job was very important Lady Boothroyd said. It showed respect for the people you were serving and an awareness of the seriousness and responsibilities of your role.

Hardworking, always impeccably and correctly dressed through her long career and having made it her business to completely master constitutional issues first as an MP and then as speaker, there’s one endearing facet of her life that is easily forgotten. As a young woman, entranced by the magic of theatre and dance and greasepaint, she had once trod the boards. Miss Betty Boothroyd in her young days, and with her very giving spirit, had been an actress.

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