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Political participation
Women activists in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa refused to cede space to extremists.
those on harassment at the workplace, acid attacks, and evil customs.
During a one-day roundtable conference in late September in Islamabad,
women parliamentarians and party leaders agreed to build consensus within
their parties to provide minimum of 10 percent quota for women on winnable
seats in the 2013 elections.
Since few women are able to take active part in the political process of the
country, the ones who do are confronted with greater barriers and
discrimination. The few women who are able to make it to the top are often
subjected to character assassination. One such case gained much hype in
2012 in which Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar was made the subject of
unfavourable gossip.
Minorities
The government moved the bill titled ‘Constitutional (Twenty-Third)
Amendment Act 2012’ to pass a law on the cabinet’s decision regarding
enhancement of minorities’ seats in the Lower House of parliament as well as
in provincial assemblies. This amendment contained the proposal to add four
more seats for minorities in the National Assembly, while the seats reserved
for minorities in Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan were to
increase to 10, 12, 4 and 4, respectively.
This bill came in the backdrop of a year that did not go well for the
minorities in Pakistan. In 2012, many churches (including one in Faisalabad,
one in Mardan and six in Sindh), three Hindu temples and an Ahmadi worship
place were amongst the places of worship that were damaged, destroyed or
vandalised in Pakistan. The Punjab police demolished the minarets of an Ahmadi
place of worship in Kharian while the perpetrators of most of the other cases