New Delhi: Pakistani human rights activist Gulalai Ismail, currently seeking political asylum in the US, has been at the centre of another political storm after her father — Muhammad Ismail — was arrested on 2 February on charges of terrorism and sedition. Muhammad’s bail plea was rejected and a Pakistani court sent him to police custody on 3 February.
Several international rights groups such as Amnesty International have called for his release while the US State Department said it is monitoring allegations of harassment against the Ismail family.
Gulalai took to Twitter Monday, alleging “torture cell”-like conditions in which her father has been kept. “I’ve been informed that my father has been kept in very miserable conditions in the quarantine of Peshawar Central Jail. He has been quarantined in a cell with 60 other inmates. He is forced to sleep on the bare floor despite that he still not yet completely recovered from Corona,” she said, adding how he is not being given proper food or access to the jail’s cafeteria.
She had earlier said her home in Swabi Marghuz was raided by the Peshawar police’s counter terrorism department who planted “fabricated papers/receipts” there.
Who is Gulalai Ismail?
Gulalai and her family have been the target of the authorities in Pakistan since 2019 for her work as a women’s rights activist and her involvement with the Pashtun cause.
A vocal advocate for human rights since the age of 16, Gulalai founded an NGO — Aware Girls — when she was a teenager. The NGO aimed to “empower young women, advocate for equal rights of young women, and to strengthen their capacity enabling them to act as agents of women empowerment and Social Change”.
She is also the leading member of rights group Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM) that demands accountability from Pakistan’s military for alleged “grave human rights violations against Pashtuns in the country’s northwest”. The movement believes Pashtuns have been the victims of both Taliban and Pakistani military for two decades. The PTM also demands a “truth and reconciliation commission to address claims of extrajudicial killings and missing persons”.
Born in Swabi and raised in Peshawar, Gulalai, daughter of an Urdu professor, earned a Master’s degree in biotechnology from Islamabad’s Quaid-e-Azam University in 2012. She later shifted focus to human rights, gender-based violence and countering extremism. Her work has brought her audiences with powerful woman leaders — the likes of former US first lady Michelle Obama and Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II in 2015.
Also read: US, Amnesty call for release of Ismail, father of activist Gulalai who fled Pakistan in 2019
Booked for ‘anti-state activities’
Gulalai made headlines in January 2019 when she took to Twitter and Facebook, alleging “that government soldiers had raped or sexually abused many Pashtun women”. Soon after, on 21 May, a police complaint was registered against her for attempting “to divide people on ethnic lines and incite them to commit treason”.
While Pakistani officials maintain they have no issues with her work on women’s rights advocacy, Gulalai currently faces six cases against her for anti-state activities.
Gulalai was banned from leaving the country, but she managed to escape to the US after being on the run.
Prior to that, the Ismail family alleges, several raids were carried out, numerous police officers were deployed and many family members and friends were abducted and tortured to extract information about Gulalai’s whereabouts, but to no avail.
The 34-year-old ethnic Pashtun shifted from one house to another, stayed away from any phone or computer and covered her face for the limited time she would spend outdoors. She first flew out of Pakistan to Sri Lanka with the help of some friends and then to the US. “Security officials later admitted they were frustrated that she had managed to slip out of the country,” The New York Times reported.
Gulalai currently lives in New York and has applied for political asylum.
‘They want to harass my family’
Political scientists suggest that the recent protests in Pakistan are a sign of rising anger and indicate that many acknowledge the military as the real power behind the Imran Khan government and a “cause for the political and economic woes afflicting the country”. Moreover, the country continues to be an unsafe place for women where “girls are murdered here by their own fathers to protect the family’s sense of honour, countless women are denied education, and, in many areas, beating a woman is not considered a crime”.
“What she (Gulalai) has been saying, however harsh, falls under freedom of expression,” Rasul Bakhsh Rais, a professor of political science at Lahore University of Management Sciences, has been quoted as saying. “But the institution she has talked about doesn’t want to be talked about.”
The institution that Rais is referring to is Pakistan’s military — a body that has long faced criticism by Opposition leaders for its “chokehold” on politics.
Gulalai has won many awards — Chirac Prize (2016), the Commonwealth Youth Award (2015) and the prestigious Anna Politkovskaya Award (2017).
“They just want to harass my family and to break their nerves,” Gulalai has said. “To break their morale to set a precedent, that if any… father lets his daughter speak her mind and use her freedom of expression, then the parents will also not meet a good fate.”
Also read: Want to return to a Pakistan where I won’t be killed — activist Ismail who escaped to US