Sindh High Court (SHC) has ordered the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) to issue CNICs to children with absentee fathers on Sunday – a move that has been lauded by single mothers and society at large.
A differently abled woman, Rubina, had filed a petition with SHC after she was denied a CNIC because her father’s whereabouts were unknown. Rubina’s father had left her and her mother many moons ago and when she went to NADRA to get her CNIC upon turning 18, she was asked to furbish details of her father, which were unavailable. The SHC passed the decision in favour of Rubina and others who have been unable to acquire their CNICs because their fathers were not around.
The verdict garnered much appreciation by several quarters in society, amongst which several were mothers themselves. Singer Hadiqa Kiani, who adopted her son after the 2005 earthquakes, took to Instagram to express rejoice at SHC’s decision. She said that only God knew of a single mother’s struggles in society. Kiani thanked all those who made the seminal decision possible and hoped for Pakistan to continue towards safety and prosperity.
Activist Fauzia Viqar seemed to agree with Kiani in that the verdict would make things easier for single parents. Viqar furthered that the decision would help in ‘dismantling patriarchal systems’.
Fashion designer Zara Shahjahan said that the move was very welcome, and that Punjab should follow suit. She also said that her previous tweet was very timely, in which she had expressed her grievances at the system when she went to NADRA to get her daughter a passport, but was refused because the child’s father was not present there.
Designer Maheen Ghani, a single mother, was elated at SHC’s verdict. She said that it should also be provisioned for children to be registered with their mother’s surname instead of their father’s as they were the ones raising them.
Apart from mothers, others like Barrister Ambreen Qureshi also embraced the verdict as exemplary for other provinces to follow. Qureshi said that single mothers and their children had ‘suffered far too long’.
While the allowance to get CNICs without paternal information was celebrated widely, an activist, Eman Zahra, detailed how the policy was being critiqued as an affront to the family system. She said that people had called the move the ‘end of family culture’ because the policy would reign in a new wave of child births without marriage.
Simultaneous to the ease that would be granted to single mothers, NADRA also took up a campaign to register orphaned children in the database on Saturday. The body has an aim to register all orphaned children within the year.
