Liberty of Afghan Women at Stake: Henceforth No Driving Licence to Women
Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, May 3: Slowly but surely the Taliban, the ruling clique in Afghanistan, seems to be tightening its grip on women’s liberty. “Slowly, slowly the Taliban want to increase the restrictions on women,” the educated women in the war-torn country feel.
The apprehension has come from the Taliban’s handling of women when it first time ruled the country before banished by the American forces. Though the Taliban.2 is claimed to be a “changed organisation” and has promised to treat the women citizens as equals, not many in the country and elsewhere believed it.
The latest diktat signifying the Taliban’s real intentions has come from its orders to progressively reduce the women drivers on the roads. Taliban officials in Afghanistan’s most progressive city have told driving instructors to stop issuing licences to women, media reports indicated. While Afghanistan is a deeply conservative, patriarchal country, it is not uncommon for women to drive in larger cities — particularly Herat in the northwest, which has long been considered liberal by Afghan standards.
“We have been verbally instructed to stop issuing licenses to women drivers … but not directed to stop women from driving in the city,” a senior official of Herat’s Traffic Management Institute that oversees driving schools, said. A woman driving instructor who owns a training institute confirmed the report and said the Taliban want to ensure that the next generation would not have the same opportunities as their mothers. “We were told not to offer driving lessons and not to issue licenses,” she said.
The insurgents-turned-rulers seized back control of the country in August last year, promising a softer rule than their last stint in power between 1996 and 2001, which was dominated by human rights abuses. But they have increasingly restricted the rights of Afghans, particularly girls and women who have been prevented from returning to secondary school and many government jobs.
“I personally told a Taliban (guard) that it’s more comfortable for me to travel in my car than sit beside a taxi driver,” a woman resident said. “I need to be able to take my family to a doctor in my car without waiting for my brother or husband to come home,” she said.
Naim al-Haq Haqqani, who heads the provincial information and culture department, said no official order had been given. The Taliban have largely refrained from issuing national, written decrees, instead allowing local authorities to issue their own edicts, sometimes verbally. “It is not written on any car that it belongs only to men,” said a woman who has been driving for years. “In fact it is safer if a woman drives her own vehicle,” she felt.
The 26-year old Zainab Mohseni who had recently applied for a licence because she says women feel safer in their own cars than in taxis driven by male drivers, believed the latest decision was just a fresh sign that the Taliban regime would stop at nothing to prevent Afghan women from enjoying the few rights they have left.
