We Are All Qandeel Baloch

Of all the new experiences that have come with my move to Bombay, from blowing Death air kisses in rollercoaster autorickshaws to braving the angrily pelting rains, travelling in a local train has been the most aesthetically intriguing.

As I anxiously foot tap the minutes away till my train arrives at Andheri Station, I notice that in the massive crowd of commuters, men make up the majority while pinches of women, adorning boldly coloured outfits, are lightly dusted under a sign that spells “Ladies compartment.”

A friend of mine once said that people don’t make their fashion choices frivolously. So, I can’t help but wonder that while I’m dressed in dark jeans and a black t-shirt to blend into the shadows and avoid the male gaze, other women are dressed like fluorescent life jackets that will call attention to the same issue. Our solutions may be different but our problem is identical: the inability to feel safe in public spaces.

26-year-old Fauzia Azeem, who made every effort to conceal her identity and clung to the stage name of Qandeel Baloch, was otherwise like any other Indian woman- acutely familiar with gender-based violence.

Born in 1990 into the confines of the bite-sized village of Dera Ghazi Khan in Pakistan where women occupy as much public space as they do on a late night at a Mumbai local platform, Qandeel was a jubilant soul, says Jon Boone.

Qandeel’s rebellious spirit wafted in her at a very early age. Wincing at the idea of marriage and the shackles that were quietly packaged with it, she told Hufsa Chaudhry, “I said, ‘No, I don’t want to spend my life this way’. I was not made for this. It was my wish since I was a child to become something, to be able to stand on my own two feet, to do something for myself.”

But married off she was, at the adolescent age of 17 to a physically violent Asif Hussain. “That man tried to throw acid on me. He said ‘I’ll burn your face because you’re so beautiful’,” she alleged.

Acid attacks in South Asia, particularly in India and Pakistan, are far from rare, especially due to class and caste conflicts.

Qandeel’s struggle finds further resonance with women in Indian society. Fleeing an abusive relationship and losing custody of her son in the process, she migrated to major cities hunting for a job to support herself, like a hungry predator.

“I completed my Matric and my Bachelors. I did a marketing job, I worked as a bus hostess, I did a lot of jobs, I struggled a lot. I got out from there,” Qandeel proudly told Chaudhry.

Soon, she found herself in Lahore for an audition for the Pakistani spin-off of American Idol.

“Is your name Pinky?” a judge sarcastically asks a young, peppy, and desperate-to-please Qandeel dressed in parrot green and blinding Barbie pink, as vivid as the women at Andheri station. After a failed singing audition, Qandeel, who moments ago had told the judges that she was working as an actress, wailed freely in unquantifiable grief and in melodramatic fashion in front of the filming crew.

Possessing a penchant for performance, Qandeel floated dreams of building a reputation in the entertainment industry. But, patriarchal attitudes forced her to take stock of other options and make a professional detour. “You know how showbiz misuses girls and the things they indirectly tell them to do at parties. I have faced a lot of such problems,” Qandeel bravely confided in BBC News during an interview about a system hardly different from Bollywood’s.

However, her passion, nay, her need, to perform for adoring crowds still lead to her gleeful accosting of the camera, like a parched sunflower to plentiful sunshine, like an unaware moth to a life-threatening flame.

Her videos on Facebook and Instagram may look homemade, but it was strategically planned out. “She would write scripts, discuss ideas and keep filming retakes until she was completely happy she had created something that would go viral. And she was always looking out for news events and ‘hot trends’ to exploit,” Boone writes. She soon earned her the tag of being “Pakistan’s Kim Kardashian,” a public figure ripe for sexual exploitation and moral chastising, both by men.

Come March 2016, when Qandeel offered to do a “strip dance” if Pakistan won the T20 cricket World Cup, she had unknowingly sparked the chain of events that would lead to her killing. Standing on the jagged cliff of fame- or notoriety- Qandeel exchanged heated words with Abdul Qavi, a grave-faced mullah, on television about her social media presence, which culminated into a controversial in-person meeting. Thereafter, Qandeel would discover that posting photographs of herself playfully posing with the clergyman, wearing his woollen cap would ignite national patriarchal sentiment like nothing she had ever said or done before.

“And oddly enough, those are two things Pakistan does not deal well with as a society: the internet and ‘badly behaved’ women,” said Masterjee Bumbu of Bumbu Sauce, a rock band that wrote a song dedicated to Qandeel.

Conservative antagonism bypassed the screen and filtered its way to her family, especially her brother, Waseem Azeem who took it upon himself to “defend the honour” of his family by sedating Qandeel with drugs and strangling her in the dead of night, writes Boone. He has been entangled in the judicial process since January 2017.

Regardless of her untimely death, Qandeel’s spitfire feminism is a legacy for South Asian women. Fearless in the pursuit of freedom and agency, “Her Facebook posts and videos were an extreme subversion of her country’s cultural norms. She twerked for the camera, filmed herself taking a bath, and danced in a bikini,” writes Boone

She rightfully believed that her confident and fearless taking back of public space would inspire generations of young women to do the same. Her Twitter feed reads, “I will fight for it. I will not give up. I will reach my goal. & absolutely nothing will stop me.”

But while it’s easy to romanticise Qandeel’s story as one of struggle, fame, and martyrdom, Issam Ahmed reminds that “all this seeming progress toward gender equality belies the everyday struggles that women are forced to endure at the hands of men who seek complete control over everything, from how they dress and speak to their access to public and professional space.”

India and Pakistan, despite their political tension, stand face to mirror in their treatment of women. While Pakistan’s statistics may present a more dismal state than India’s, the two patriarchal countries reflect similar attitudes from the same indifference for crime prevention to the same lack of action after the fact. The misogynistic poison in South Asian societies run deep in its veins and is pumped from the source of history and religion.

And today, two days following the anniversary of Qandeel Baloch’s death, I must still mimic Moses and part the stormy sea of jostling men at Andheri Station while clinging to my belongings for bodily protection, not materialism, with lowered eye contact.

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