In 2001, as Sindh went to vote for General Pervez Musharraf`s local government system, an intellectual leader emerged from Khairpur in the PPP: Nafisa Shah.

`There were only two women nazims across Pakistan myself and Faryal Talpur. During that time, I did some social work in education, got some two-room schools constructed at a cost of Rs250,000 each, made citizen committee boards, gave common people some money and they came up with committee schemes.

Nafisa is a current member of the National Assembly and vice president of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association. During 2008-20l3, Shah served as chair of the National Commission for Human Development, general secretary of the Women`s Parliamentary Caucus, and a member of parliamentary standing committees on finance, minorities, economic affairs and statistics.

But arguably, it is her work on honour killings in Khairpur that has been disruptive and groundbreaking. Although her research work started in her tenure as nazim, she spent a decade conducting fieldwork and completed her doctoral thesis `Honour Violence, Law and Power: A Case Study of Karo Kari in Upper Sindh` in 2010 at the University of Oxford.

She is the only parliamentarian to have completed her doctorate from Oxford while still a member. Her book on the topic is under publication.

`My research is something that was a personal interest which grew out of journalism. I was at Newsline with Razia Bhatti, who I consider her my mentor and she guided me in the world of journalism. I received an APNS award on the groundbreaking research on honour killings in 1993; it was the first story on honour-based violence in rural Sindh.

Indeed, such is the scope and breadth of her work that her family background is more of an afterthought. Her father, Qaim Ali Shah, is the incumbent Sindh chief minister but has little sway in his daughter`s decisions. In fact, Nafisa takes great pride in how her parents brought them up.

`My mother always thought that girls must not be behind boys in education; they must get the same kind of education if not better and just for this reason she moved from Khairpur to Karachi because she said that if my boys can study in good schools, my girls should also study in good schools,` she says.

`My father is a self-made, hard working person who believes in ideological politics. After the emergence of the PPP, he joined the party because it was a socialist party. He was a small town lawyer and helped the people and that`s why he became popular. We have small land. My family is what one would call middle class in rural area,` says Nafisa.

`From an early age we were made to realise that whatever we have to do we have to do ourselves; we were never made to realise that we have some entitlement or were privileged, even when our father was a minister in Bhutto`s cabinet.

`I grew up during the Gen Ziaul Haq`s era when the PPP and the entire political process came under the crackdown and my father went underground. We developed that instinct of survival that we have to survive on our own hard work. We don`t have that feudal mindset that we have landed property and so we don`t have to do anything. We have all worked hard to be what we are today.

Nafisa enjoyed a good rapport with Benazir Bhutto, who had always wanted her to join the party. `She was in touch with me and we used to discuss different topics and I used to work for her when I was at Oxford.` Benazir later asked her to contest election for nazim in her home district and subsequently, she was elected as the Khairpur nazim in 2001.

`Because of our political training to work against the status quo and work for rights, and being a part of the women`s caucus we did a lot of work on rights-based legislation,` she explains.

`It is very unfortunate that when we enact laws for things that are our women`s natural right as per our Constitution, it is criticised,` she says of the recent protection of women law.

`In my research I have seen that a lot of violence against women happens in the family. So if there is a troubled family, the state cannot sit idle and say that because in our values we do not intervene in family affairs, therefore let the women continue suffering. That is something that we cannot allow. I think there is a long way to go, we have made these enactment but we are very far from enforcing them.

In Nafisa Shah`s view, in Pakistan we have some great role models such as Malala, Shermeen Obaid, Razia Bhatti and Benazir Bhutto and they have struggled for every inch of theway, but a lot more still needs to be done: `I don`t think that women in Pakistan have had an easy sail. I think women of Pakistan have moved far; but unfortunately, there is still a long way to go.

The former Khairpur nazim argues that women`s rights cannot be separated from larger rights struggle. `When we talk of women`s rights the same women are more likely to talk about injustice if it takes place against children, against labour, against farmers, against youth, because women`s rights agenda is basically a rights agenda.

But while the cause of women has been furthered with increased legislation and activism on gender-based issues, the road to freedom is still long and is laced with impediments.

`We never get it on a plate. If we think we will get our rights on a plate we are mistaken; we have to work for it. I think people like myself who are privileged in the sense that we have access to corridors of power, still have not done enough in mainstreaming women.`