"A Bride for an Eye" by Sarah Mujtaba
Imagine a life where you cannot leave the house, cannot get an education and are always told that since you are a woman you have no rights. You are not as good as your brothers or the other male members of the family. Your sole duty as a woman born in this male dominated world is to stay home and to learn how to become a slave for your husband and his family for the rest of your life and give birth to multiple children until a boy is born. If being told that being a woman makes you an object and a man’s property was not bad enough to show how inferior you are and that your importance as women is equivalent to that of a shoe on a man’s foot, now you have to pay the price for someone else’s crime.
We have all heard of all these things happening to women around many underdeveloped parts of the world, however there is one tradition which is barely ever spoken of and which is something which is blindly given no attention. This unknown custom is known as Vani.If a male member of a household commits a crime, the closest virgin female member of the guilty must be given away as payment to the victim’s family.
Almost 400 years ago, this cruel inhuman tradition started . In Mianwali, two ‘Pathan’ tribes of fought a bloody war against each other. There were about 800 people who were murdered during this bloody period. To resolve the tension, at that time the head of the Tank district was called upon. He called the jirga (a traditional assembly of leaders that make decisions by consensus and according to the teachings of Pashtunwali), who decided that girls are given as qisas, another way of saying an eye for eye in order to resolve the dispute and both families would come to peace and become part of one household, this was considered the only way to resolve the dispute. This tradition is known as Vani.
Four hundred years later, where women have reached the moon and have done so much to achieve their freedom and make their mark in the world, you would assume that the world has finally accepted that women are as good as men and are not anyone’s property, well you can think again. This vicious tradition continues on where young girls as young as a year old are given as Vani and when they are of a mature age must go live with their husbands. Stripped off their dreams and desires all for the so called “ghairat” (self respect) of the male members of their families.
Other’s who are as young as eight and nine are given away right away. Now one can only imagine what happens to these girls who are to be wed and brought into the same household who has lost a loved one due
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to a member of the bride’s family. If they protest they are often beaten and tortured physically and mentally until they consent. When they get married,often times the girl is beaten, treated badly and sometimes even killed as revenge for the murder. However, since she is a woman, her blood and murder has no value.
This custom still exists today because of the lack of education and ignorance of people and the government who does not want to do anything about this issue. The custom became illegal in Pakistan between 2005 and 2011, however, it still continues as no strict action is taken by the local police and because it is a decision made by the elderlies.
A solution to this problem is to abolish the jirgah system, this system in which elderly men use traditional and century old solutions to solve issues should be stopped. If people who are part of the village council use the solutions which were used to four hundred years ago then there will be no solution to Vani, and women will be given away as a payment. The local police should be involved and should be used to solve such issues and the guilty should be the one being punished.
As Malcolm X said “The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses.” Pakistan’s population is 61% rural, therefore the media in Pakistan should bring awareness of such issues which affects more than half the population of Pakistan, rather than just the issues which are happening in the more urban areas of Pakistan.
The Government should also take stricts actions. Rather than simply making the act illegal, the government should hire and make sure that the police are doing their job right and that such practices are officially abolished. The law should be enacted upon properly in order for girls to stop becoming scapegoats for the male members of their families.
Vani is a cruel tradition which strips a woman off her basic rights as a human being and makes her believe that she must endure pain and suffering and be told that she deserves to be punished and treated badly simply for being born a woman for the crime of another man. The media, along with the government should take strict actions in order to stop this vicious cycle, so it does not pass on from generation to generation.