Hindu woman enters Pakistan poll fray
15 April 2013 12:48 AM GMT
When Veero Kolhi made the asset declaration required of candidates for Pakistan’s May elections, she listed the following items: two beds, five mattresses, cooking pots and a bank account with life savings of 2,800 rupees.
While she may lack the fortune that is the customary entry ticket to Pakistani politics, Kolhi can make a claim that may resonate more powerfully with poor voters than the wearily familiar promises of her rivals.
For Kolhi embodies a new phenomenon on the campaign trail - she is the first contestant to have escaped the thrall of a feudal-style land owner who forced his workers to toil in conditions akin to modern-day slavery.
‘The landlords are sucking our blood,’ Kolhi told reporters at her one-room home of mud and bamboo on the outskirts of the southern city of Hyderabad.
‘Their managers behave like pimps - they take our daughters and give them to the landlords.’
To her supporters, Kolhi’s stand embodies a wider hope that the elections - Pakistan’s first transition between elected civilian governments - will be a step towards a more progressive future for a country plagued by Islamic militancy, frequent political gridlock and the worsening persecution of minorities.
Kolhi, however, has no realistic chance of victory and the 11 May vote will offer only a mirage of change. A sturdy matriarch in her mid-50s who has 20 grandchildren, Kolhi - a member of Pakistan’s tiny Hindu minority - is the ultimate outsider in an electoral landscape dominated by wealthy male candidates.
Kolhi was once a ‘bonded labourer,’ the term used in Pakistan for an illegal but widely prevalent form of contemporary serfdom in which entire families toil for years to pay often spurious debts.
Since making her escape in the mid-1990s, Kolhi has lobbied the police and courts to release thousands of others from the pool of indebted workers in her native Sindh province, the vast majority of whom are fellow Hindus.
On 5 April, Kolhi brandished a document officials had just issued, authorising her to run for the provincial assembly. With no rival party to back her, Kolhi’s independent run may make barely a dent at the ballot box in Sindh, a stronghold of President Asif Ali Zardari’s ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP).
While she may lack the fortune that is the customary entry ticket to Pakistani politics, Kolhi can make a claim that may resonate more powerfully with poor voters than the wearily familiar promises of her rivals.
For Kolhi embodies a new phenomenon on the campaign trail - she is the first contestant to have escaped the thrall of a feudal-style land owner who forced his workers to toil in conditions akin to modern-day slavery.
‘The landlords are sucking our blood,’ Kolhi told reporters at her one-room home of mud and bamboo on the outskirts of the southern city of Hyderabad.
‘Their managers behave like pimps - they take our daughters and give them to the landlords.’
To her supporters, Kolhi’s stand embodies a wider hope that the elections - Pakistan’s first transition between elected civilian governments - will be a step towards a more progressive future for a country plagued by Islamic militancy, frequent political gridlock and the worsening persecution of minorities.
Kolhi, however, has no realistic chance of victory and the 11 May vote will offer only a mirage of change. A sturdy matriarch in her mid-50s who has 20 grandchildren, Kolhi - a member of Pakistan’s tiny Hindu minority - is the ultimate outsider in an electoral landscape dominated by wealthy male candidates.
Kolhi was once a ‘bonded labourer,’ the term used in Pakistan for an illegal but widely prevalent form of contemporary serfdom in which entire families toil for years to pay often spurious debts.
Since making her escape in the mid-1990s, Kolhi has lobbied the police and courts to release thousands of others from the pool of indebted workers in her native Sindh province, the vast majority of whom are fellow Hindus.
On 5 April, Kolhi brandished a document officials had just issued, authorising her to run for the provincial assembly. With no rival party to back her, Kolhi’s independent run may make barely a dent at the ballot box in Sindh, a stronghold of President Asif Ali Zardari’s ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP).
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