Ayesha Gulalai
Pakistan is in the grip of a scandal. Ayesha Gulalai of Imran Khan’s Tehreek-e-Insaf party has accused her boss of sexually harassing her. If she can prove it, Khan, the charismatic leader, will lose his immunity from political damage.
On the first of August, Member National Assembly (MNA), Gulalai, accused him of sending her messages of seduction from his protected Blackberry cellphone in October 2013. After the message, she said she took her father to meet Khan to know if he wanted to wed her, but Khan was not forthcoming. She said during a press conference on television that she was resigning from the party because “no lady is safe” from the immoral conduct of Khan and his “gang” of cronies in the party.
Khan has several politically damaging court cases going on against him but his charisma and street power appear to have endowed him with impunity from any negative fallout. Will this scandal dent his popularity? Most probably not; it is Gulalai who will be punished.
Anywhere else, the accusation would have kicked the pedestal from under Khan. His appeal among the masses, the youth, and significantly, Pakistani women, is such that his popularity didn’t fade even after his second wife went public on how she was summarily divorced soon after the wedding. His magnetism remains damage-proof as he takes the moral high ground to castigate his opponents for corruption.
Khan’s street power keeps him secure against the police posses sent to arrest him by courts whose summons he routinely flouts. But this time, he could be in trouble, and if Gulalai decides to produce evidence of the lewd calls he allegedly made way back in 2013, even a judicial process could be set afoot by his political opponents to get him disqualified as an elected member of parliament under the “piety” Article 62/63 of the constitution of Pakistan.
A prime minister has just been kicked out of office by the Supreme Court on the basis of Article 62 for an “irregularity” involving non-declaration to the Election Commission of a few lakh rupees from a foreign company owned by his son many years back. The Gulalai accusation may not go to court but it stands a better chance of piercing the impenetrable armour of Khan’s popularity in the months leading to the country’s next general election.
But the accuser is receiving predictable fallout. Gulalai is accused of taking a big bribe of Rs 8 crore from “enemy” ruling party PMLN to do Khan down, a kind of revenge the deposed Nawaz Sharif was now determined to take. Khan’s Pashtun base in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa also reacted by threatening a fellow-Pashtun party-member with the burning of her house under tribal law; she could have her face scarred with acid which one partyman in Peshawar swore he would throw on her if she didn’t stop accusing Khan.
It took no time for Gulalai to realise she was on the backfoot and needed protection. She hastily moved out of the place where she lived in Peshawar to Islamabad. She took the dubious decision of submitting to interviews with the TV channels till she realised that half of the anchors talked to her to embarrass her and to make her commit mistakes that could be exploited once the matter moved to court.
Suspicion surrounded the PTI response to Gulalai when she disclosed that party spokesperson Naeemul Haq, close to Khan, too, had tried his luck with her on the phone, proposing marriage — unprepossessing Haq is a divorcee and thought he could get a leg-up in the party by marrying her. He blundered after she flagged his crudity. He first said there was nothing like sexual harassment in proposing marriage — in fact, it could be praiseworthy in Islam to propose to a woman still deprived of the blessing of marriage — till the party told him he had made a gaffe and bailed him out by stating that the proposal of marriage was not his but a plant through his hacked phone. Haq’s stupidity may finally nail Khan too.
But the media is divided down the middle. The National Assembly has set up a committee to hear Gulalai’s charge against Khan but his partymen say the committee is filled with his enemies. This means that no solution will be found to the crisis created by this case of harassment.
Women are already mostly arrayed against her and Pakistan is immune to accusations of harassment of women. Women have a low social status culturally but additional handicaps come from the way Pakistanis interpret Islam.
