Ladies and Gentlemen:

By your focus on the essential rights of woman in society, you support the voice of the powerless, the exploited, and the abused. For women, despite the strides taken in the last century, are still the most powerless and exploited group in the world community.  For me, the cause of women, is God’s most noble cause, the cause of justice, equality, and life. So I thank the Indian Chamber of Industry for inviting me to New Delhi.

We meet today in challenging times. I feel myself privileged to speak to the captains of trade and industry of one of the biggest growing markets of the world community. Those major markets promise to make your country a major decision maker in the world.  India's emergence in the post Cold War period shows the importance of the force of free markets in the political landscape of the global community.

That force of market politics, when applied to my country in 1993, made it one of the ten emerging capital markets of the world.

Ladies and Gentleman,

This is my second visit to New Delhi. I came here first to take part in the funeral ceremonies for Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. I came to pay respects to a leader with whom I had worked to build a safer South Asia.

Prime Minister Gandhi and I signed the most important bilateral agreements in 1988 since the signing of the Simla Agreements by our parents in 1972.

We signed the first nuclear confidence building treaty, the non attack on each others nuclear facilities agreement.

We established, for the first time, hot lines between the General Headquarters of both our countries.

We opened our borders for better trade.

At SAARC, we determined to work for a common SAARC travel card and a common SAARC pre posted mailing card.

We understood that Europe triumphed over hate and war and that we could do so too.

We reached draft agreements on redeployment of troops to Kargil without prejudice to our view points on the icy area.

We reached a draft agreement for the mutual reduction and redeployment of troops between our two countries.

But both our governments went and with it the brief spring when two young leaders stood at the brink of historical change.

The hope born then was rekindled under the leadership of Prime Minister Vajpayee. He visited Lahore 1n 1999 and invited the country's military ruler to Agra in 2001.

His Home Minister Advani agreed to talk unconditionally with the All Parties Hurriyet Conference.

The Indian Government announced a unilateral ceasefire in Kashmir and met with the militant groups.

These were important steps taken.

They required vision and strength.

The vision to build a South Asia free of tension, where the people of South Asia have the strength and the courage to reject tension and embrace peace to build a better world for the coming generations.

Ladies and Gentleman,

I was planning to visit India for some time. I planned to come here in 1999 but the fighting in Kargil broke out.

I planned visiting India this October, but fighting in Kabul broke out.

It was with some trepidation that I accepted the invitation by the Confederation of Indian Trade and Industry.

This time the stars were right, I am here with you and it is a special privilege for me to speak before you today.

Too few political leaders from India and Pakistan, particular from the political field, visit each other.

I am here to break that precedent and set a new precedent.

I hope that can be the start of new precedents that our two Nations are able to achieve as we enter the twenty first century.

The Pakistan Peoples Party, which I lead, trusts in relationships of a political nature. We invited the Opposition leaders of the SAARC to Karachi in 1992 to build closer political links between the elected representatives of our region.

Ladies and Gentleman,

It is impossible to separate women’s rights from human rights, just as it is impossible to separate economic justice from political liberty. In the modern era, these issues are the essential operationalizations of morality, of civility, of a just society.

I come before you with a unique double focus. On one level, as the victim of human rights violations today and in the past, and on another level as someone who has had the extraordinary opportunity to address women’s rights in my own country.

I am no stranger to the issues of women’s empowerment.  I wear the scars, on my body and my soul, of the abuse of basic human rights, and thus I view oppression through the eyes of the victim.

We do not live in a perfect world, and even amongst the rapidly expanding democratic community there often seems coldness, indifference, hypocrisy and lingering prejudice.

Many thought heaven would appear on earth with the crumbling of the Berlin Wall.

A decade later we find that Europe may be united, but the cause of justice of the discriminated people in many countries is far from complete.

Let us be truthful, the world will be a fair place when each and every human being on our planet is treated equally.

And there is no human right more fundamental, and more universal, than equal rights for woman in the new century.

Democracy is the first step toward humanity’s liberation.

But it is not an end in itself.

Liberty depends on social and economic justice, and above all on the universal, non-selective application of human rights to all citizens of the world.

Economic development and political development are surely linked, but both are predicated on guaranteed human rights.

As the first woman ever elected to head an Islamic nation, I feel a special responsibility about issues that relate to women.

I am often asked about the place of women in the message of Islam. For me, the discrimination against women has little to do with Islam and more to do with custom and tradition.

Here in South Asia, many of the women in the ethnically and religiously diverse countries suffer similar fates.

Too many are denied the right to live fully.

Too often, women are seen as extensions of the male rather than as individuals in their own right.

One of the difficulties I encounter is the prejudice born of centuries that a woman is the property of the man.

Here I am an independent woman, educated in modern universities, the daughter of an emancipated leader and I find myself the center of controversy in the minds of the traditionalists.

For them, my husband is to blame for letting me work.

Traditionally respected men did not allow their wives to work. By that definition, in their eyes, my husband must be something other than a respectable person.

They punish him, to punish me, and in seeking to punish us, they seek to punish women, and men who see women as separate legal entities, everywhere.

The battle with the traditionalists is a battle that has dogged my political career. During the general elections in 1988, the opposition claimed that those voters who cast their vote for me would have their marriage vows dissolved in the eyes of God.

Such hysterical denunciation of a woman seeking the highest electoral office highlights some of the prejudices that women in South Asia face as they seek political and economic empowerment.

South Asia is home to some of the deepest prejudices that exist against women. Honour Killings and gas stove murders of women are the extreme manifestations of the prejudices against women.

Yet South Asia is home to the largest number of women elected in any place and at any time in the world community.

Sri Lanka's Mrs. Bandernaike led the way with her election as Prime Minister. This was followed by the election of India's Mrs. Indira Gandhi. Pakistan and Bangladesh came next.

Bangladesh went one step forward in having a leader of the house and leader of the Opposition from the same gender.

The rise of women leaders in South Asia often reinforces the traditionalist view that women are extensions of their menfolk. We are often told that we got where we did because of who we were related to, rather than inherent qualities.

The leading men in our father's lives called Mrs. Gandhi "Guryha" (doll) and I was called "that girl".

Certainly, who we were was important to why we entered the  political minefield. Our political backgrounds enabled us to network better whilst our family names gave us the charisma that comes with the legend that the men in our lives were.

Yet it would be half the story to write of us as extensions of the male members of the family. There were other men in our families, some of whom did come forward to contest and compete.

Its important to recognise that each woman leader in South Asia had something within her which enabled her to succeed.

Family name is important and character is important too.

In South Asia, the rights of women have more to do with the social class they belong to.

Women from privileged classes live life according to different standards than those of other classes.

For me, the empowerment of women lies less in laws and more in economic independence.

And it lies also in men. Our Fathers’ who encourage us. Our male colleagues who stand by us. Our male followers who support us and the male citizens who vote for us.

Dependent women, like dependent nations, are not free to take the decisions they may like to take. For them survival becomes the code with which to address their situation.

I was reminded about this starkly when Pakistan's military regime justified joining the international coalition against terror on grounds of survival.

The military regime said it feared that its nuclear assets and other strategic concerns could be endangered if it failed to join up.

That is not the way I would have put it. Yet it illustrates two points. First that, women often make pragmatic choices because they are yet to become free.

Second, that even men put survival before other issues which shows that the strength of the social background matters where freedom is concerned.

We are all born free, as Rouseau said, yet too many of us are in chains. These chains come from the state or they come from the mind.

These chains can be broken if we will it. Its important for South Asia to break the chains that hold its women back.

Women bear children, feed and look after infants. Women, by nature, learn to nurture.

This is a time when women’s leadership, at all levels of society, is all the more important.

Its when we learn to nurture that we can free our societies from warlike thoughts, aggression and other characteristics that forced us onto dangerous paths.

For women to succeed, job opportunities and avenues are needed.

Respect for the fundamental rights for women will flow when women have the economic means to stand up for themselves.

The government I led did its best for women. We recruited Lady Health Workers, an army of them, to reduce population growth rate and infant mortality rate.

We hired new teachers for our primary schools and seventy per cent of them were women.

We set up a women’s bank run only by women for women although men were allowed to put their money in the accounts.

We ran advertisements asking women to report husbands who beat them to the police stations.

We appointed women judges to the superior judiciary for the first time in our history.

We established women’s police stations which women could visit with confidence.

We lifted the ban on women taking part in sports.

We hosted a Women’s Olympics and held the first meeting of the Parliamentarian for Muslim women.

And because I was a woman, every woman felt protected.

Not a single case of honour killings was reported during my tenure after we arrested a man who burnt his wife with electric wires in 1994.

My Government signed the Convention Against Discrimination Against Women as I led the delegation to the Beijing Conference of Women in 1995.

It was a remarkable time in the lives of Pakistani women.

In tens of thousands they joined the work force.

I remember a meeting with the women in the rural background of a place called Toba Tek Singh in central Punjab.

"What's the news?" I asked the women as we met to chat about the changes taking place.

"The rate of divorce has gone up", I was told.

For a person of my generation, this was a shock. Divorce was frowned upon when I was growing up.

"That's terrible", I said. In return, they were shocked. They wanted to know why it was terrible.

I spoke of broken families and the suffering that divorce would cause, to which they replied.

"We have too much self respect to now accept what we were prepared to accept in the past".

Having jobs had liberated them. The opportunity to earn enabled them to make free choices.

For me, independent means is the most powerful weapon in the empowerment of women.

Today in Pakistan, the veil of repression has descended across our people. The cause of human rights is being set back decades. But the cause of women’s rights, I am sad to say, is being set back a century.

The attempt to turn back the clock on women’s rights, on liberal society, on pluralistic democracy focused on me, on destroying me politically at home and destroying my reputation abroad.

Only recently did the world  learn, first from the Sunday Times of London and then Zee Television that the charges brought against me were concocted and contrived and the judges that tried me and my husband were ordered to do so, were  threatened to do so.

The tape recordings of these orders from the Prime Minister’s Office to the courts may have shocked the world, but they certainly did not shock me and the forces of democracy in Pakistan.

We have become accustomed to all and every attempt to use the politics of personal destruction to turn back the course of democracy, human rights and women’s rights in our homeland. 

It didn’t work then. It will not work now.

It saddens me to see the price the women of Pakistan paid for the dismissal of the democratic government I led. It is particularly heartbreaking to see the dismantlement of the array of special programs that I instituted in my two terms as Prime Minister to raise the quality of life of women in Pakistan.

My departure led to the collapse of national revenues, investment and growth.

And the money for people welfare programs was simply not there.

Of those programs, the programs for women, the weakest of the social classes, were hit first.

The women of South Asia cannot be expected to struggle alone against the forces of discrimination, exploitation and manipulation. I recall the words of Dante who reminded us that

"The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of moral crisis."

Today in this world, in the fight for the liberation of women, there can be no neutrality.

Our outrage at violence and discrimination directed at women cannot be selective.

Hate, bigotry and violence have no international borders. Every shamed, abused girl, wherever she lives, is a mute witness for all women, everywhere in the world.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I speak at a time when new forces shape the new century, the new millennium.

We shape a world committed to universal social, economic and political values - this triangular definition of comprehensive human rights for the future.

We must shape a world free from exploitation and maltreatment of women.

A world in which women have opportunities to rise to the highest level in business, diplomacy, and other spheres of life.

Where there are no battered women. Where honour and dignity are protected in peace, and in war.

Where women have economic freedom and independence.

Where women are equal partners in peace and development.

Repressive forces always will stand ready to exploit the moment and push us back into the past.

Let us remember the words of the German writer, Goethe [pronounced Ger-ta]:

"Freedom has be re-made and re-earned in every generation."

The women of South Asia will not be free, until we determine to empower them.

Empower them with words, with laws, with awareness, with economic opportunities and with role models.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are not free if girls cannot read.

For a girl who cannot read has no future; and a girl with no future has no human rights.

In this elegant city, we must remember that in the time it took for me to address you today, over one thousand children have starved to death on this planet.

As long as these basic violations of human rights are allowed to continue, none of us -- regardless of where we live, regardless of how  civilized our life-styles, regardless of our own personal circumstances and comforts -- none of us are free.

A growing number of women enter the world force even as I speak with you today. They change the social complexion of the market force.

Women change consumer patterns of the past.

This is a world where gender and markets determine the power of a backward or forward nation.

This is a world where economic interests drive nation states into new political alignments.

I am told there are 51 multi-national corporations that comprise the world’s 100 largest economies. The remaining 49 are countries.

The sales of General Motors and Ford are greater than the GDP of sub-Sahara Africa. The American superstore —Wal-Mart— has a higher turnover than the revenues of many Asian countries.

Corporations are fast assuming the responsibilities that states failed to meet. Health, housing, education are some of the sectors where corporations are stepping in for their employees.

Ladies and gentlemen

We live in a new era. An era which witnessed the break up of many countries, including the all powerful superpower the Soviet Union.

An era where the earth has shrunk into a global village.

An era where the social consciences of the world is still to develop as ruthless market forces push their way across the capital centers of the world.

Global Capitalism promises much in terms of changing lifestyles.

Yet, unless its forces are matched by organised and articulate regional responses, the repurcussions could be dangerous for those of us still living with high rates of poverty.

And our rates of poverty are high.

South Asia has one quarter of the world’s population.

But it lives in 4% of the world’s land area.

One Quarter of humanity – and its income is less then 2% of the total income of the world.

One quarter of humanity – and its per capita is only 10% of the world average.

These figures do not make me proud.

They cannot make you proud.

This is a time for countries of South Asia to reduce tension, acknowledging there are disputes, to focus on meeting parallel challenges.

My Party and I are committed to conflict management over the Indo Pak dispute of Jammu and Kashmir.

We witnessed the fall of Yugoslavia into a multitude of ethnic and warring states.

Nations that fail the test of economic viability can collapse into bloodshed and civil war.

Globalisation changes cultures, geographies, social organizations and the way we live, think and conduct ourselves.

Globalisation is freeing individuals from state control, making travel easier and business transnational.

The over-regulated state suffocates businesses forcing decentralisation to achieve growth.

Capital flees at the first tremor.

As states de-regulate, they abandon their authority.

The weakening state authority enables individuals to open up to new ideas and new values.

The sweeping changes that are occurring can occur rampantly.

Or they can be fashioned by states that have the wisdom to put their priorities right.

The old trade association are giving way to new ones.

The World Trade Organisation is emerging as the key structure.

We, the countries of South Asia, are yet to hold meaningful discussions on how South Asia should approach the different issues raised at this important forum.

The WTO will fashion the economic of the next half century. I hope it is a better half century than the one which we saw with GATT and UNCTAD.

I was concerned to see the United Nations report that more than 30 percent of the real per capita incomes have fallen over the last 35 years.

I am concerned that the disparity in per capita income between the poorest and the richest countries is over 300 hundred per cent today. Half a century ago, it was much less.

The countries that prospered were the countries that lived in peace.

Countries that suffered were countries caught in conflict.

The gap between the rich and the poor grows as long as we fail to signal the social climate of a success story. A Harvard Professor (David Landes) wrote in THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS:

“Poverty is inextricably linked to armed conflict".

Ladies and gentlemen:

Globalisation is restructuring our planet’s economic and political arrangements directly affecting humanity on a scale unwitnessed since the Industrial Revolution.

Tremendous changes thunder past with little joint attention by the countries of South Asia.

Our populations are the largest.

The impact on us the greatest.

Yet our voices most feeble.

That could be otherwise were we, the great countries of South Asia, to realise our potential and wrest the control of our destinies into our hands for a better future.

The debate, for our future, yours and mine, and those of our neighbours is raging right now.

This new world, this new century, this new millennium is a strange one. On one side life beckons with the brightest prospects since the dawn of time.

On the other hand, young men fall prey and inflict hell in the hope of going to heaven.

Life is a precious gift, to be lived.

For too long South Asians instead embraced death.

When death becomes beautiful, one can understood how living life has become impossible.

It is for the leaders, the captains of the ships of state as well as of trade, to chart a new course for a new destination.

A destination that gives premium to life which is the most precious gift bestowed by God.

So precious we are told that to kill is the worst of crimes.

Our part of the world too has been teetering on the verge of doom and disaster too often.

We have been at each other’s throat.

We have fought four wars.

Troops on both sides continue to fire at each other and we have nuclear bombs too.

A push on the button can end life before we realise what was done in desperation.

We owe it to our children to build a world free of the threat of nuclear annihilation.

**********************************

Ladies and gentlemen:

My commitment to the rights of women was inspired by the categorical position taken by Pakistan's founder, Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah.

In his address to the university students in 1944, he said, "No nation can rise to the heights of glory with half its population shackled. It is a crime against humanity that our women are confined within the four walls of their homes like prisoners; they should be side by side with men as their companions in all spheres of life."

Ladies and Gentlemen:

I will end with a quote from Alexander Pope who said:

“What war could ravish, Commerce could bestow, And he returned a friend, Who was a foe”