Pakistan

Hugh Bayley Excerpts

Thursday 4th July 2013 Westminster Hall

[Hugh Bayley (York Central) (Lab)]

I am most grateful to you, Mr Gray, for calling me to speak.

I will not trouble the Members here in Westminster Hall with a long peroration about the wise and thoughtful main recommendations made in the report, which I know the Chairman of the Select Committee, the right hon. Member for Gordon (Sir Malcolm Bruce), and other members of the Committee will have spoken about. However, there are two particular issues that, as a member of the Committee who participated in the visit to Pakistan—I have moved on from a debate in the main Chamber about another part of the world—I feel very strongly about and that I am glad to have the opportunity to raise.

It is quite clear to me why the UK has such an important development partnership with Pakistan; it is because of our history and because of the need for us to work with the Government of Pakistan to resolve security problems that threaten both Pakistan and neighbouring countries. Integral to that development process is empowering women to get an education, play a full role in society and have their human rights defended.

Shortly before we went to Pakistan, we heard about the dreadful shooting in that country of Malala, a schoolgirl who was shot simply because she had the effrontery to wish to have an education. That event stunned people around the world and, interestingly, changed attitudes in Pakistan considerably. I went with some other members of the Committee—a sub-group—on a field visit to Haripur in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where we went to a school. It was a Government girls’ secondary school, where the girls re-enacted a piece of drama, asserting, as a consequence of Malala’s shooting, the right of girls, like boys, to have an education, enter the labour force and have professional standing. It was extremely moving. When I talked to parents and teachers after the performance—there is a parent-teacher association at the school—they were very clear about the fact that the shooting of Malala had to change the nature of politics and society in Pakistan.

Following that visit, it struck me that, although the UK is a major aid donor, we do not always listen enough to the voices of women in the countries where we are working. It also struck me that, at the very least in respect of Pakistan, we ought to establish an advisory panel of women to work with our Department for International Development office to ensure that all our programmes address the women’s dimension of the issues that they aim to address, whether it be education or health care.

When we were in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, we also met representatives of a number of Pakistani non-governmental organisations, including a quite inspirational woman, Maryam Bibi, who leads a women’s self-help organisation called Khwendo Kor. I have known Maryam Bibi for a number of years. She did a postgraduate degree at York university and then returned to the tribal areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where women’s rights are often threatened. She has done some remarkable things, such as establishing schools for girls and then standing up to men who threatened to kill her for doing so. She has a very persuasive manner. When we met her on this visit, she told us that she had been running a campaign to try to persuade Pakistani society in these conservative tribal areas to recognise that women should have rights of inheritance. She did that not by demanding those rights as a woman, but by seeking to find male community leaders who would make the argument. She had been talking for many weeks with a mullah, who appeared intellectually persuaded that women should have a right to inherit, but was unwilling to make a statement to that effect in Friday prayers, which was what she was urging him to do. That went on for many weeks and then, eventually, he made the statement. Maryam Bibi asked him what had finally changed his attitude, and he said, “Well, you persuaded me early on, but it took a long time for me to get my will changed, so that my wife could inherit.” He did not want to call on others to do something that he had not done himself.

Maryam is an extraordinary woman. I hope that she is the sort of person that DFID would consider using as an adviser. It is not for me to determine whom DFID selects, but it would be a mistake to think that we can get to the heart of the problems that Pakistani women face without Pakistani women advising us—not only on what the problems are, but on how to tackle them. I hope very much that the Government will consider that.

The second issue in Pakistan that I want to discuss, which struck me like a bolt out of the blue, was the gross—indeed, grotesque—violation of human rights that comes from debt bondage. One of our field trips, involving the whole Committee on this occasion, was to a low-cost private school. Doubtless, there will have been discussion earlier in the debate about the role that those institutions play.

After meeting the head teacher and some of the other teachers as we visited the classrooms, we had the opportunity to meet some parents. Those parents were brick kiln workers. They were very, very low paid and looked down upon by various members of society, and were living on the margins of a city in an area where the state had not deigned to provide a school, which was why a small private initiative had been set up to provide an education of sorts for their children. A state school would not have done any good anyway, because the children also had to work in the brick kiln. Consequently, the private school was arranged so that the children could come rather earlier in the morning than they would to a state school and so they could leave after lunch to do their share of labour in the brick kiln.

Those women told me that every one of them—every one of those parents—was indebted to the brick kiln owner and that debts ranged from 100,000 rupees to 300,000 rupees. Sometimes, they had taken out loans for things such as weddings, but more often because of injury and because they needed medical treatment. The typical earnings for people working in the brick kiln were 350 rupees per week per family—for husband, wife and two children. Those people owed perhaps up to two years’ wages. Such a debt for people on such a low, subsistence income is one they will never repay. Indeed, one woman told me that she had inherited her debt from her husband when he died.

Once someone gets into that kind of debt, there is no escape. Those people are illiterate, so even if they wanted to challenge the brick kiln owner over their debt, they would not have the skills to do so. One huge value of providing education for their children is perhaps that, in the next generation, it will be less possible for usurious moneylenders to pull the wool over those people’s eyes.

We raised that problem with the Chief Minister of Punjab. He told us that the law prevents debt bondage. His adviser, Zakia Shahnawaz, said that the intention was to introduce a Bill to establish a minimum wage of 600 rupees and to reinforce the law that ended bonded labour. I hope that that happens; it is desperately needed. If each wife and husband each earned 600 rupees a week, the children would perhaps not need to work in the brick kilns as well and could go to school in the normal way like other children. The debts of those people should be written off. Such debts should not exist in any civilised society anywhere in the world, but for that to happen we need not just UN resolutions and outrage expressed in this Palace of Westminster, but practical action to work with such people—the poorest of the poor and the lowest of the low—to give them the ability to go to court to challenge what is being done to them, crushing them and their children.

Although the issue exists not only in Pakistan, I would like a start to be made there with our Government putting together a programme of work to provide a citizens advice service to enable people such as those I have talked about to gain their freedom, which is their birthright, but which they are denied.