International Women’s Day is a day for honouring women; marked on the calendar as a commemoration for sisters and mothers and daughters and wives. Most such occasions are instances of stock taking and reckoning when the successes of the past year can be touted, their accomplishments polished and primed as indicators of progress.

This would be the case for Pakistani women as well; certainly five or six can be unearthed from the hapless millions and plastered out as posters of just how great things are.

As individuals, their accomplishments may be real, even meaningful, but as a collective they would be a misrepresentation – a convenient way for the men of Pakistan to continue the pretense that things are alright with the country’s other half.

They are not. In law and culture, social life and public life, international stature and local esteem, Pakistani women face a daunting set of challenges.

For those that must venture out, for school or work or anything at all, there is no safety on the streets. For those who stay within the intimate sphere of their homes, there is similarly little peace, their lives driven by unceasing burdens of child-bearing and domesticity.

One Pakistani mother dies every 40 minutes of complications in childbirth.

In sum, Pakistan seems unsure as to what to do with its women, whether to permit them freedom, whether to imagine them as equal citizens, or to deem them worthy of anything more than the task of breeding a new generation.

In keeping with this condition of crisis; this moment of avoided choices, the only appropriate commemoration is an illustration, through the lives of some women, how the lives of all Pakistani women, are suspended in the balance, are cases pending.

The Four Women from Kohistan

It has been almost three years since the grainy video that condemned four women from the Azadkhel tribe, Bazigha, Begum Jaan, Sereen Jan and Amina fell victim to the intrusive eye of a cell phone camera.

The grainy cell phone video that circulated, showed them singing and dancing at a wedding. This is not a liberty permitted to Pakistani women of the Azadkhel tribe.

Its elders convened a jirga of only men, and condemned the women, along with a young minor girl named Shaheen to death for this crime of mirth.