It has been over two weeks since social media star
Qandeel Baloch was killed by her brother and cousin as she slept in her
parents’ home in Multan, on July 15, 2016.
In
the days after her death there has been much debate about the role of
the media in this murder, with many laying the blame of her death
squarely on the shoulders of the media, which tirelessly covered her
titillating public stunts during her short public life.
Qandeel
shot to fame in 2014, when she released a video proposing suggestively
to politician and cricket legend Imran Khan. That video went viral and a
social media star was born.
Emboldened by the response
from a conservative nation, Qandeel moved onto more provocative promises
such as ‘strip dancing’ for the Pakistani cricket team if they won
against India. The girl from a lower middle-class family from Dera Ghazi
Khan soon developed a big following with an audience, that may not have
approved of her, but which waited eagerly for the next titillating
offering from her.
She displayed rare media savvy in the
way she released videos that were destined to go viral from the moment
they were uploaded on social media. In an environment where the lines
between Pakistan’s mainstream and sensationalist media seem to have been
irretrievably blurred, Qandeel was soon invited to popular talk shows
and even shows that discussed current affairs on a regular basis.
It
is still unclear whether Qandeel’s death qualifies as honour killing.
Her murder could well have been the result of a squabble with her
drug-addicted brother Waseem Azeem — who she was supporting — over
money. However if we were to take her brother’s confession to the police
at face value, it raises several questions about the narrative that the
mainstream media had shaped for Qandeel Baloch.
Widely
portrayed during her short public life as a promiscuous, salacious
woman, Qandeel’s provocative proposal to Imran Khan, her promises to
‘strip dance’ and her rendezvous with government cleric Mufti Abdul
Qavi, were covered tirelessly by the mainstream media, infuriating many,
including allegedly her own brother.
She got used to a
jeering crowd that attacked her callously on social media, even
releasing a video asking her haters to unfollow her.
To
be fair, Qandeel basked in the attention the mainstream lavished on her.
It was a symbiotic relationship where she provided the latest
controversy and the media fed and fuelled it, in order to strengthen the
other symbiotic relationship it shared with its consumers, that is, you
and me.
Unfortunately, the jibes did not stop, even when
things took what should have registered as a serious turn. In the days
before her death, the media dug out Qandeel’s ex-husband to further milk
her notoriety and to fill up air time with TRP-worthy fodder.
Despite
going on air and talking about receiving death threats after the Mufti
Abdul Qavi episode and talking about being physically abused during a
short-lived marriage, the media preferred to turn a blind eye and busy
itself with propagating the narrative it had fashioned for her, by
asking her husband pointed questions designed to malign her and to pat
itself on the back for yanking out a skeleton from her closet.
With
Qandeel dead, it is time to ask whether the media can really take the
moral high ground by saying that they are merely supplying what we are
demanding? We may not approve of Qandeel’s ‘rendezvous’ with Mufti Abdul
Qavi, but we were eagerly lapping it up when the ‘news’ broke on TV and
the controversy ran ad-nauseam across our screens.
The
Qandeel-Mufti rendezvous was god-sent for the media, as it strengthened
the popular narrative it had created about her, adding several hundred
thousand eyeballs and more points to the TV channel’s TRPs.
Will
Qandeel’s death change anything? In the past the media has been blamed
for the death of other celebrities, such as Princess Diana. But little
has been done to curb the sensationalism it broadcasts so unthinkingly
and carelessly. If anything, since Princess Diana’s death and despite
much introspection by the media back then, the tabloid business around
the world has only grown.
A scroll down the average
social media newsfeed and it becomes hard to tell the difference between
the mainstream and tabloid media. Also the media’s largely self-serving
stance on public figures becomes obvious.
Will channel
heads and editors accept that they encouraged unchecked coverage of
Qandeel while she lived? Will they accept that they milked the public’s
fascination with her against their better judgment?
With
Qandeel gone, not only is it time to talk about outdated feudal customs
that she may have fallen victim to, it is also time to question the
media’s role in creating a frenzy and appetite around her, her death and
the events leading up to it.
Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, July 7th, 2016
Changing women: Moving into public space
by Mansoor Raza
The
murder of Qandeel Baloch, allegedly for the sake of male honour, is
symptomatic of a wider trend in Pakistan. Violence against women — or at
least of its reporting — is on the rise. Be it the case of young
Sumaira of Karachi or the social media star Fouzia Azeem alias Qandeel
Baloch of Multan, there is an emerging pattern: violence will be used to
deny three basic rights of women and indicators of empowerment — what
to study, where to work and with whom to marry.
The horror stories about the rise of violence against women may be masking a complementary trend: the increasing role of women in the public sphere
Yet despite all pressures women are actually increasingly
claiming more space for those critical decisions of their lives. The
causes of this change are interesting and even more interesting are the
indicators of the evolving status of women of Pakistan.
Let us have a look at what some of these indicators are telling us.
Numbers
As per various census reports of the Federal Bureau of
Statistics (FBS), around 48 million women were added between 1951 and
1998 (the census years). In 1951 the women population was recorded at
15.6 million where as in 1998 the women head count was approximately
63.5 million.
Between the two census periods of 1981 and
1998, 23.5 million women were added to Pakistan’s population, a number
that is greater than the actual female population reported in 1961: 20
million.
Though the per annum growth rate is slowing
down, women’s share in the total population has increased from 46.22 per
cent in 1951 to 48.05 per cent in 1998.
The population
of young females (between the ages of 15 and 24) has increased from 6.8
million to 12 million between 1981 and 1998, a growth of almost 78 per
cent between the two censuses. This gigantic addition obviously requires
adjustments in policies of state, a task which is yet to be
accomplished.
Education
Female literacy rates have also shown a tremendous increase.
There were 4.2 million literate women in 1981 while in 1998 the number
of literate women had risen to 13.8 million, an addition of 9.6 million
literate women, which translates into a per annum growth rate (PAGR) of
over 14 per cent. The percentage of female literates 10 years or older
rose from 15.60 per cent in 1981 to 32.60 per cent in 1998.
What
these statistics reveal is that the achievements of women in
educational attainment (enrolment from class one to university) over the
last 47 years (from 1947 to 1998) showed remarkable improvement. There
were only 1,335 girls enrolled in universities in 1951, while in 1998
the figure had gone up to 25,469.
In 1998, women
comprised almost 28 per cent of university students. This indicates a
demand for better utilisation of educated females in the economic
spheres as it can help reduce the dependency ratio. Of course, it also
indicates a change in the entire socio-political fabric of the Pakistani
society.
Marriage
There has been a sharp decline in the percentage of married
women. The percentage of married women with respect to the total women
population of 15 years and above dropped by 4.2 points between 1981 and
1998.
This decline was even more pronounced in the urban areas, where the percentage declined by almost 12 points.
The
average age of marriage for women has also risen, with more women
choosing to marry later, completing their education being the most often
cited reason.
In 1981 there were 78,731 divorced women
while in 1998 the figure rose to 154,343, an addition of 75,612 divorced
women. The PAGR of divorce in women was observed as 4.04 per cent while
in males it was 1.48 per cent.
Divorce also appears to
be more of an urban phenomenon in women, since the PAGR is 6.62 per cent
in urban females as compared to 3.20 in rural females. Interestingly,
despite false claims, divorce rates have actually declined since 1972.
Work
The transition from a feudal culture — with its reliance on
an agricultural modes of production, a barter system, dependence on
landholdings and the responsibility on male members to feed the entire
family, with primitive skills — to service capitalism puts more economic
pressures on women to work and become earning partners.
As a result, a high growth rate (in absolute numbers) is observed in the female labour force as compared to the male population.
In
1981 women’s share in the total labour force was only 2.14 per cent. By
1999-2000, although the overall percentage of the civilian labour force
has gone down, female participation has gone up to 6.68 per cent of the
total population of 10 and above. This shows more involvement of women
in public spheres in order to earn a livelihood.
How do
we interpret these statistics? Taken together, these changes in
demographic indicators show that the actual transition that is taking
place is in the priorities of the female population of Pakistan. The
desire for job security is slowly replacing the earlier concept of
security associated with marriage.
Aspiration for mere
literacy has been replaced, overwhelmingly, by the desire for higher
achievements in the educational field. Attire has changed, vocabulary
has transformed and the gender interaction has morphed.
Women have become increasingly more assertive about their ambitions, far more than their preceding generation.
Stuck
in residual feudal norms, the traditional mindset — with the help of
the orthodox establishment — protests against the progress made by women
but this is a failing proposition. Power is slipping away from them.
One
can think of it as the flailing, desperate attempts of a crumbling
order. Urban women through education and technology have developed
cultural linkages with globalisation that continue to dictate their
choices in life. They are unwilling to let go of whatever freedoms they
have achieved and aspire for more.
The unanswered
question is actually whether institutions are geared up to accommodate
this sea change? If they are not, in the days to come we are likely to
see more violence against women.
Figures worked out by the writer from census reports of FBS
The Brave New World Of Pakistan’s Social Media
Transgressions of social norms are seeping from the digital realm into the real world
By Hasan Zaidi
Quite
aside from the horrifying circumstances of Qandeel Baloch’s murder,
those who don’t use social media or those not particularly familiar with
it, might be forgiven for being baffled at the phenomenon that she was.
Qandeel was probably the first true female internet
celebrity in Pakistan, in that her celebrity had nothing to do with any
achievement beyond her provocative presence on social media.
There
have been other social media-aided celebrities — the ‘Eye To Eye’
singer Tahir Shah, the ‘One-Pound-Fish’ man Shahid Nazir, the camp
self-promoter on YouTube from Sialkot Awais Lovely and the
Twitter-braggart ‘Prince’ Affan bin Saqib, for example — but Qandeel was
probably the first woman to achieve fame solely through social media.
Unlike
other women who have used social media as a tool to advance their
existing careers in film, television or music, Qandeel took the opposite
route. She was reputedly a singer but her only known foray into singing
was as a contestant on Pakistan’s Pop Idol programme where she was
eliminated in the initial audition stages.
She was also
said to be a model but had never actually worked as a model in anything
until she became famous through her Facebook, Instagram and Twitter
accounts.
In fact, even her identity as ‘Qandeel Baloch’
was basically constructed through social media — which is why there was
increasing scrutiny about her origins as her notoriety grew: what her
real name was (Fouzia Azeem), whether she was even from a Baloch tribe
(she apparently wasn’t) and her marital history (an apparently abusive,
short-lived marriage that produced a child).
What set
Qandeel apart from other internet sensations in Pakistan was that she
was a flesh-and-blood woman, not simply a faceless, pretend-woman, of
which there are, of course, plenty on social media.
It
was unfathomable to a lot of Pakistanis that a real woman could be as
brazen or shameless about her sexuality publicly, because her entire
persona was built around flaunting her body, talking about sex and being
in-everyone’s face.
The comments on her Instagram feed —
which had hundreds of thousands of ‘followers’ by the time of her death
— were probably 30 per cent from voyeurs getting a kick out of this but
were overwhelmingly from those attacking her for “being a disgrace to
Pakistan and Islam.”
What’s, of course, interesting is
the fact that people would still follow her feeds or make the effort to
come to her pages only to abuse her. Her persona was so unimaginable for
a Pakistani (of course, they are used to such personas from the West or
even from India) that there was even speculation about whether she was,
in fact, originally a man who had undergone a sex change. For many,
that would have explained everything.
What’s interesting,
sociologically, for Pakistan is not that there are constructed personas
on social media — very common phenomena around the world — but how
transgressions of socially acceptable behaviour are seeping from the
digital realm into the real world and influencing how they are viewed
and debated.
This is all the more remarkable given that
internet penetration in Pakistan is still estimated at below 18 per
cent; more than 80 per cent of the country’s population does not even
have access to social media platforms.
Certainly, much of
Qandeel’s output on social media — pictures and videos of herself in
various forms of undress, thoughts about sex and sexuality, commentary
on the hypocrisy of well-known people — is still verboten on mainstream
media or even in polite company.
And yet, people were
discussing her among themselves in private gatherings around the country
and on social media itself; even television and the print media had
been forced to acknowledge her.
Of course, TV and print
referred to the content of her posts only obliquely, if at all. When
they referred to her as ‘a model’ they never clarified what exactly
people might have seen her in. Until, of course, the Mufti Qavi
brouhaha, which allowed TV to run fairly sanitised photographs of her
with the cleric and to peg her as the woman who brought Mufti Qavi down.
Incidentally,
in and of themselves, those photographs — whose ‘scandalous’ high point
was Qandeel donning Mufti Qavi’s karakuli cap — would mean nothing,
divorced from the context of Qandeel’s online persona.
There
have always been transgressive people in society — people who flout
traditional social norms — but they never had the ability to come into
contact with the huge numbers of people that social media platforms now
afford them. Had Qandeel Baloch existed in the pre-social media age, it
is more than likely that most people would never even have heard about
her.
Social media is transforming society and media in
ways that have not been studied at all in Pakistan. Consider Qandeel’s
origins and trajectory: a poor girl from a small village in the remote
and largely feudal Dera Ghazi Khan area, who goes on to become a
national and, to a certain extent, international sensation, purely on
the basis of her force of will and ability to project herself.
Irrespective
of the means employed to achieve fame, it shows the power of social
media to cross class, linguistic and ethnic barriers in today’s Pakistan
and its increasing ability to dictate what the mainstream media — and
thus the larger national population — takes notice of.
It’s a brave new world and mainstream Pakistani media is mostly playing catch-up.
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