The recent apex court’s judicial activism on
exchange of girls to settle disputes is rather
dramatic. Perhaps for another few months, the
chiefs, and the tribal elders will think before
mediating marriage disputes. But very soon, life
will normalise, and exchanging girls for an odd
buffalo, or an acre of land, or even a house, or
using girls to settle disputes over a buffalo, or
land, or a house will go on, as if nothing ever
happened.

A political economy of trading and trafficking
girls through marriage has strengthened and
increased as the rights of Pakistani citizens
become vague with disintegration of state
institutions, like the police and the judiciary,
that protect and enforce these rights.

A vast and intense trafficking of girls is taking
place across the length and breath of the country
with complicity of the family, tribe, and
implicitly by the state. A girl child sees her
life pledged, negotiated, bartered, sold, long
before she knows who she is, and sometimes years
before she is born.

In Upper Sindh, in times of scarcity and in times
of plenty, Balochis sell their little girls.
Herders come from far away lands, loaded with
sheep and buy girls and leave some sheep behind,
and go back into the hills. Nomadic Pathans come
down buy girls, or leave them behind, and vanish
into the hills. Girls from rural Punjab flee
southwards, to Sindh to escape from the vicious
contracts through which their lives are pledged.
Local Sindhis exchange women and girls across and
through generations, pledging even future girls
which will be born. Women build their houses, and
repair their fallen roofs, after selling their
girls. Vast trading networks of girls take place
everyday and all the time. Girls are trafficked
across provinces and borders, sometimes taken as
far out as Quetta, Loralai, Kandahar, or brought
from here to there.

The old doddering men are the best bidders of the
girls; they offer the best rates, rich with their
properties, their buffaloes, and their houses.
Sometimes since they have plenty of girls to
offer, they simply offer their granddaughters or
grandnieces in exchange for girls who would be
their wives.

In Upper Sindh girls are regularly sold for a
price averaging sixty thousand rupees, for some
market factor I cannot figure out. Sometimes a
pregnancy, is pledged as part of the contract —
the first girl to be born is to be returned to
the mother’s brothers, or the middlemen in
marriage to be given in marriage to anyone they
choose. However, such exchanges take place
through active participation of mothers, and
fathers, grandfathers and grandmothers, and
uncles and aunts of the girls.

Mothers, too, are complicit. A young woman,
Janvri Baloch, about 30, came to me, weeping
about her girl child who was only 16 but pregnant
with a second child, and in a serious ante-natal
condition. "I am poor, my husband is old and
infirm, I gave my girl for sixty thousand rupees,
as I did not have a house, and I built my house,"
she confesses sadly. And now the little child is
producing her second child and is very sick.

Another woman, a Lolai Baloch, repaired the roof
of her house from the sixty thousand she got when
she gave away her daughter to a man from the Pal
community in the neighbouring village. The little
girl soon ran away from the old man who wed her
after paying for the little bride. The woman came
to me, to ask me to help with the divorce. I
asked her to go to the court.

Some women do take a stand against the
trafficking of girls. A Pitafi woman, a widow
with four girls came to me, asking for help, when
her second daughter, Rukhsana, only 10 had
already been pledged in marriage by her
brothers-in-law Maula Bux and Mehar, to Qasim for
Rs30,000. A deposit had been given for this
pledge by the bridegroom to be. Qasim, who is
about fifty-years-old, already married and
childless, killed his father’s sister as kari and
took a fine of Rs200,000 from a neighbouring Rind
he accused of being karo with his dead father’s
sister. Rukhsana’s mother’s brother-in-law now
calls him ghairatmand because of this act and
thinks he will be an appropriate husband for the
ten-year-old niece.

Rukhsana’s mother would like to have her
brothers-in-law arrested to deter them from
carrying out the contract. However, there is no
guarantee, that tomorrow Rukhsana’s mother does
not negotiate marriage of the same daughter by
getting the money for it from her own kin. As it
is, Rukhsana’s elder sister was sold by her
father, when he was alive, to the Burriro
community, also for sixty thousand rupees. At
that time, Rukhsana’s mother did not resist. Most
of the money from the first daughter’s marriage
was gambled away. About ten thousand was loaned
to his brother Maula Bux, who, by the way, has
still not returned this money to his brother.

The fate of these girls is tragic. Many who are
very young, and wed to old men, often run away,
in search of a better life. They endanger their
own lives, and also become vulnerable to further
trafficking. Those who mediate between these
run-away girls or support them in running away,
often resell them to another man, or marry them
themselves. Sometimes these middle(men) are
fathers and mothers themselves.

A very young girl came on a bus and a train all
the way from Okara. She was running away from her
old and sterile husband, that her father had wed
her to, after taking Rs30,000 from the old man.
She would run to her family to escape from the
old man, but her father would tie her to a
charpai, and take her back to her husband, every
time she would run away from him. This happened
regularly for three years. Now that her father
broke his neck and died, after falling from a
tree, this girl, who roams the land, a lost
child, is free but yet in danger of being
trafficked again.

Several laws indirectly deter commercial
exploitation of girls, or their forced
transactions in marriages, but none do so
directly. Under the Muslim Family Law Ordinance,
a girl must have attained the age of 16 and a boy
must have attained the age of 18, and both need
to consent before the marriage can take place.
Pakistan has also ratified the UN Convention on
the Rights of Child, which prohibits child
marriages.

A recent law, ’The Prevention and Control of
Human Trafficking Ordinance’ (promulgated in
October 2002), applies to all children aged less
than 18 years and defines human trafficking to
include recruiting, buying or selling a person,
with or without consent, by use of coercion,
abduction, or by giving payment or share for such
person’s transportation, for exploitative
entertainment. The ordinance prescribes a
punishment of 7-14 years’ imprisonment and also
includes parents if they are guilty of the crime
involving their own children therefore they are
liable to the same punishment.

However, this law seldom applies to parents who
sell their girls in marriage, as marriage is a
sacred formal legal family rite, and therefore
masks trafficking, even when it is a commercial
transaction.

In 2002, the chief justice of Pakistan declared
the Pukhtoon custom of swara, giving women in
marriage to settle disputes, as un-Islamic and
expressed concern over the rising number of these
cases. The Chief Justices of the high courts were
all given instructions to ensure that trial
courts do not allow for a woman to be given as
compensation. The recent criminal law amendment
2004 also disallows giving women as compensation
for disputes or murders and therefore a complaint
can easily be registered under the amended law to
punish those who give girls in compensation for
settling disputes.

However the laws are silent on the specific issue
of selling girls in and through marriage when no
dispute is involved. And by default, as the
multiple laws and their interpretations stand
today, the rights of girls are filtered through
the family. The Pakistan Penal Code, after
incorporating the Qisas and Diyat Ordinance,
empowers the legal and biological heir, the wali
with powers to compound the offence or killing,
with powers of life over his children and minors.

The family is entrusted with law and with power
to regulate individual rights. When the wali’s
close kin kill women, these walis are given
sanction to forgive them. On the other hand, the
state does not offer any effective institutions
to uphold individual rights of men, women or
children when these are violated by the
proverbial walis. Hence, the family when it is
the source of strength is also the subject of
vulnerability.

The courts are right to show anger when tribal
elders negotiate such marriages on the stage of
the jirga. Hazar Khan Bijirani will probably not
do it anymore. Or the Pir of Barchoondi Sharif
will think twice before exchanging girls for
settling disputes after the wrath of the courts.
But how will the courts show anger when countless
fathers and mothers, grandfathers and
grandmothers, and uncles and aunts, willingly,
and happily negotiate or pledge their little
daughters, granddaughters and nieces, taking them
by their hand, or in their laps on any ordinary
day, and leaving them behind to strangers for
some everyday expense like cash for cigarettes,
for money owed in gambling, or for repairing
fallen rooftops?