NO COUNTRY FOR BOLD WOMEN
A beautiful woman in winged eyeliner and a low-cut top lies on a bed urging her favourite cricketer to win the next match. In another post, she pouts at the camera from a hot tub. She posts a selfie with a cleric wearing his hat at a jaunty angle. Her posts are viewed millions of times and the comments beneath them are full of hate. As her notoriety grows, the commentary on national talk shows is just as vitriolic. They call her Pakistan’s Kim Kardashian, and they say she’ll do anything for attention.
Before she became Pakistan’s first social media celebrity, Qandeel Baloch (whose real name is Fouzia Azeem) was a small-town girl from an underprivileged family, raised in the conservative rural province of Punjab. She was married off at age 17 to her cousin Aashiq Hussain and had a son with him, before leaving her husband a year later, saying he was abusive. She was obsessed with TV dramas and dreamt of being a soap star. After moving to Pakistan’s media capital Karachi on her own without her son, she landed a series of minor parts – wearing hot-pink tights, sunglasses and sky-high heels – she was mocked by the judges for her high-pitched singing voice. Her audition video has been watched more than 10 million times on YouTube. It was her first video to go viral, but it certainly was not the last.
