Severe financial need, grievous living circumstances, and existential threats to livelihoods have one thing in common. They are not what decides the pension received by the daughter of a deceased civil servant. Under the Punjab Civil Service Pension Rules, there is one explicit prerequisite for the pension to trickle down to the daughter, presupposing the passing of both parents and absence of a brother: the status of not being married[1]. To that end, it is the association of a man with a woman that defines the latter’s autonomy in claiming what would have been an uncontested birthright were the genders reversed.
It is precisely this artificially curated dichotomy between an unmarried or divorced woman compared to her married counterpart that the Honorable Judge, Ayesha J Malik, took apart in Province of Sindh vs. Mst. Sorath Fatima. Writing in response to a circular by the Secretary to the Government of Sindh, Finance Department, that restricted the right of a surviving daughter to the family pension on the condition of being a widow or unmarried at the time of the pensioner’s passing, Ayesha Malik rejected this restriction as an “onerous burden”[2]. First, she discarded any rigid interpretation of the pension rules concerning marriage status as having a temporal requirement[3]. Second, and of more relevance to the issue at hand, the law itself was labeled as a byproduct of a “systemic bias” that associates the financial security of women with their marital status, derogating their rights to be contingent on another individual: whether that be spouse or parent[4].
The implications of such a derogation are two-fold. One, there is a reductionist perception of women’s financial autonomy as being a derivation of her attachment to someone else. Thus, the incidence of deprivation is ignored among married women, on the presumption that all spouses would provide adequate monetary support. Secondly, it is the social status of women, as a whole, that is made intrinsically contingent on an external body. Thereby, legislation becomes a reflection of a gendered ‘us’ and ‘them’.
Borrowing from the work of Ayesha Jalal, the product of such a polarity is a “bigotry-turning-inward”[5]. Fixated ideals of a universal Islamic equality are, in this way, superseded by a state-enforced patriarchal hierarchy. This gendered hegemony exemplifies what female representation in Pakistan means. It is gender that cuts across the race, class, religion, and ethnic-based cleavages within the Pakistani nation-state.
Going back to the civil service pension laws in question, of note is its ambivalence to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, which Pakistan is a ratifier of. Within it, Article 15 (2) states,
“States Parties shall accord to women, in civil matters, a legal capacity identical to that of men and the same opportunities to exercise that capacity. In particular, they shall give women equal rights to conclude contracts and to administer property and shall treat them equally in all stages of procedure in courts and tribunals.”[6]
This is followed by Article 16 (1), which explicates, in part:
“States Parties shall take all appropriate measures to eliminate discrimination against women in all matters relating to marriage and family relations and in particular shall ensure, on a basis of equality of men and women”[7]
Reading the clauses in conjunction, Pakistan is bound to administer policies unequivocally treating both genders as the same party in regard to their shares in contracts or property. Accordingly, the present policy drawing a distinction between the daughter and son on grounds of marital status is a blatant violation of the said clauses.
The question that remains is what the outlook of a successful, at least relatively, civil service pension law looks like. To that end, a comparative analysis can be drawn with the UK Public Service (Civil Servants and Others) Pensions Regulations, 2014. Under Regulation 113, one of three conditions must be met for the child to be eligible for the pension: being under the age of 18, being under the age of 23 and part of vocational training or education and, lastly, possessing a mental or physical impairment alongside being under 23 or the condition having a likelihood to be permanent[8]. Two primary inferences can be drawn from this clause. There is both a gender-neutral conception of the ‘child’, thereby avoiding gendered variations in policy, and there are also provisions in place to accommodate potential dependents even beyond a certain age, in recognition of their disability.
What the legislative framework in Pakistan stands to gain from this is an understanding of the gendered distinction within its pension laws as being the remnants of a dated and uninformed policy. It is such policies that create and reinforce a void of plausible legal remedies for otherwise overt neglect of responsibilities. In essence, mere condemnation, as was the case in Province of Sindh vs. Mst. Sorath Fatima, is futile without a ground-level rework in the archaic laws of tone-deaf lawmakers.
[1] Punjab Civil Services Pension Rules 1963, r 4.10.
[2] Province of Sindh through Secretary, Government of Sindh, Karachi v Mst Sorath Fatima [2025] PLD SC 856.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ayesha Jalal, ‘Conjuring Pakistan: History as Official Imagining’ (1995) 27(1) International Journal of Middle East Studies 73, 8.
[6]Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (adopted 18 December 1979, entered into force 3 September 1981) 1249 UNTS 13, art 15(2).
[7] Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (adopted 18 December 1979, entered into force 3 September 1981) 1249 UNTS 13, art 16(1).
[8] The Public Service (Civil Servants and Others) Pensions Regulations 2014, SI 2014/1964, reg 113.
