Now it’s mannequins

There seems to be no end to the non-issues the NWFP government readily involves itself in. The most recent of these is now a ban placed on the display of mannequins in clothing stores.

In the past few days, police in Peshawar have ordered shopkeepers to take off mannequins or face a penalty for promoting what the provincial government says amounts to obscenity.

First it was a ban on all kinds of dance and singing in the province, which led to most of Peshawar’s prominent musicians and theatre actors either switching professions or migrating to other provinces.

Then, came the administrative thunderbolt according to which male doctors were told not to treat women patients. It didn’t matter whether the patient was on her death bed; she had to be seen by a doctor from her own gender.

The decision, according to several stories that came in its aftermath, cost several dozen pregnant women their lives, who died during childbirth because female gynaecologists were not available.

The fact that the NWFP is perhaps not the best of places to find female doctors was obviously lost on that province’s government since imposing such a ham-handed decision basically meant shutting out hundreds of thousands of women from medical treatment.

The decision to remove the mannequins is being zealously implemented by the local police in Peshawar. An AFP report (the matter was first reported by this newspaper’s Peshawar bureau last week) quoted a shopkeeper with a store on the city’s bustling University Road that the "strange decision" would be bad for business.

Among the other decisions taken by the provincial government, apparently, to improve the quality of life of residents in the NWFP, the following merit mention: the establishment of a committee headed by the provincial law secretary to make suggestions to bring the existing laws in conformity with Islam; establishment of a committee to Islamize the system of education; banning male coaches for women’s sports teams; making it mandatory for all girl students - from the primary level to university - to wear a hijab; formulating and implementing a rule according to which all businesses must close down at the time of prayer; formulating and implementing a rule according to which all forms of public transport must halt at prayer time, so that passengers and the driver can offer their prayers and making it harder for well-meaning and credible non-governmental organizations to go about doing their job of mobilizing and empowering women in the province.

The zealousness of the provincial government in ramming such edicts down the throat of an already devout population was matched in fairly equal measure by many local governments in the province.

For example, in Mansehra (a known jihadi stronghold) the local barbers association, quite ironically, vowed not to cut the hair of those men who did not have beards.

The result of dealing with such non-issues was that the NWFP government got a lot of bad press not only in the foreign press but even inside Pakistan. However, given that the province has a host of major problems like lack of basic education and health facilities, sanitation, clean drinking water, industrial pollution in the urban areas, unemployment in the rural areas, corruption in the police and other government departments, and the presence of a timber mafia that has basically robbed the NWFP of its once-glorious forest cover, something like forcing shops to dispense with mannequins is bound to invite censure and ridicule.

Recently, the province’s chief minister, according to a report in this newspaper, was upset with the way his government had been treated by the media.

He had said that the government had done a lot of good work but kept on getting a bad press. Well, what can he expect when his government goes ahead and imposes a ban on, of all things, the display of mannequins?