Women try to find their feet in Pakistan politics by contesting elections

Karishna Kumari Kohli, a female senator from Pakistan’s Sindh province, became a focus of local media and people a few months back for her being the first woman lawmaker from a low-caste non-Muslim tribe into the upper house of the Muslim majority country.

Kohli, in an interview with Xinhua, hoped that her entry into the senate will open new doors for women as they will see her as a role model and a beacon of hope to achieve their dreams.

“I am daughter of a poor tenant and spent a part of my childhood as a bonded laborer, but my hard work and honesty to my cause of changing my life and life of people around me has landed me in the country’s senate, if I can do it, other women who are more educated and privileged than me can do it even better,” she said.

A woman from the same Thar district where Kohli belonged contested elections for the provincial assembly of Sindh that took place on Wednesday across the country.

A tailor by profession, the provincial assembly candidate Sunita Parmar said in a viral video on social media that she is keen to protect the interest of women and work to release them from the shackles of poverty and ignorance.

“I don’t have anything against anyone or any political party. My focus is clear: I want to change the condition of women in my area. I want to work for girls’ education and play my role in providing basic health facilities to them. Political parties should accept women’s existence and capabilities, as it is the need of the hour,” she said in the video.

The country’s election commission said that this year, political parties have fielded women candidates in conservative areas.

Hameeda Shahid is one of such candidates from Dir district of the country’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

Women were previously not allowed to leave the house to poll their vote in elections, but Shahid is determined that she will change it by motivating women to stand up for their rights and choose the suitable candidate for the future.

In a recent interview with local media, Shahid said that women should join politics so that citizens could detail their problems to them, which they cannot tell male lawmakers.

The mother of six added that she doesn’t have any experience in politics, however, if she wins the election, she will work for women’s rights in her area.

According to the country’s law, it is mandatory for all political parties to allocate at least 5 percent of their seats to women candidates. The recently released figures of the election commission show that 11,885 candidates will contest elections out of which there are 305 women, which makes about 5.2 percent of the total ticketholders contesting from political parties.

Apart from this, there are 60 reserved seats for women in the country’s national assembly for which women from different political parties are selected according to the number of seats they win.

Tanzeela Mazhar, a journalist from Islamabad, told Xinhua that despite the fact that women are contesting, the chances of victory for most of the candidates are slim.

“Political parties were sure about their defeat in certain constituencies and to fulfill the 5 percent mandatory quota for women representatives, they fielded women from those constituencies while keeping the strong constituencies for the male candidates.”

Despite this, the election commission said that the elections will see the highest number of women candidates contesting for the national assembly seats in Pakistan’s electoral history.

This year as many as 171 women candidates will be in the run against 272 seats of the National Assembly across the country.