Social media fury as Pakistani official buys burqas for students

Pictures showing girls in burqas bought for them by local authorities has gone viral in Pakistan and caused a social media outrage.

A district councillor in the small village of Cheena, in northwest Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, used some 90,000 rupees ($570) of local government funds to buy about 90 burqas for students at the government-run middle school in the village.

In the region, many women traditionally wear burqas which cover them from head to foot – including their faces.

The official, Muzafar Shah, said he had bought the garments at the request of parents who could not afford them as one of his final acts before stepping down from his four-year tenure.

“Around 90 percent of the girls already wear burqas, so I thought these poor girls should have new burqas,” he told the AFP news agency, adding that previously he had used the funds to buy the school a solar panel, build a washroom, and purchase new furniture.

But he snapped two pictures – one showing a classroom full of girls wearing the burqas, and a second showing them piled on a desk – which swiftly ignited outrage on social media.

The garments were purchased “instead of focusing on improving quality of education, enforcing strict and exemplary punishments for: harassing, abusing and raping,” tweeted one user, Fatima Wali.

Gulalai Ismail, a Pakistani women’s rights activist who fled the country recently for New York, cheered the outrage.

“I’m glad to see time is changing and now more & more people are standing up against objectification of women in the garb of protection,” she wrote.

Shah said he did not understand the criticism.

“The people of the area are very happy with me … had I distributed jeans among the girls, the media and liberals would have praised me,” he said.

Provincial minister of education Zia Ullah Bangash said an inquiry has been launched in the matter and stressed that the garment is not part of the school uniform.

“Our dress code includes white trousers and a loose blue tunic, however, it is up to girls if they want to dress a burqa over the uniform. We can’t force them,” he said.

The move came weeks after government was forced to scrap an order for female students to wear veils in two other conservative districts of the same province.

Burqa-wearing is common for centuries in the ethnic Pashtun heartland that straddles the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.