The Triple-Layer Captures of Women Empowerment: Analysis with A Focus on Two Political Parties (PTI and ANP) In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 2008-2023

Abstract

Although Pakistan constitutionally guarantees gender equality and 33 percent female quotas in reserved seats, women in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) district lead less than one in ten village councils which has been frozen between the secular-nationalist (ANP, 2008-2013) and the Islamist-populist (PTI, 2013-2023) administrations. This article brings together feminist institutionalism and decolonial intersectionality as a means of questioning how the progressive party manifestos become systematically diluted at the point of implementation. Basing our arguments on 36 interviews of counter-stories, three gender-segregated focus groups, fifteen years of budget performance micro-data, and a fatwa corpus (2013-2022), we formulate the so-called triple-layer capture model:

1. structural--fiscal re-appropriation, ghost DWO posts, male parliament boards;
2. cultural--jirga no-objection certificates, 47 Deobandi fatwas, honour-based ATM-card patriarchy;
3. Intersectional--110km to nearest VAWC, landlessness, Christian/Hindu triple jeopardy.

Both parties achieved quota break through, but women never had more than 9 percent and less than 10 percent of the estimated domestic-violence cases taken to court as UC chairmen. Theoretically, we prove that the symbolic incorporation is not a policy failure, but a gendered balance result of inter-locking patriarchal infrastructures absorbing and neutralizing (regarding ideological wrapping) egalitarian rhetoric. Empirically, we provide the first intersectional audit of party gender policy failure at the frontier that was a post-colony. We have KP-based, costed blueprint-statutory 10% gender responsive budgeting, mobile VAWC caravans, and male-Alima counter-fatwa networks, which also provide a copycat strategy in the polity of patriarchy with quotas in motion and empowerment creating an impasse.