During an interview with a local publication, Yashma Gill expressed her thoughts about Minar-e-Pakistan incident where a TikTok influencer Ayesha Akram was attacked by 400 men.
While many netizens are of the opinion that Akram planned the incident, the Phaans actor disagrees. According to her, “If for the sake of the argument, we believe that she supposedly planted those 400 men, which I think is a lot more unbelievable than it being an actual harassment case.”
She went on, “even if I say that she supposedly planted three or four men, and the rest of the men just followed suit, then sure, she planted them, but don’t those men have free will? They had the power to choose right from wrong, and they chose wrong. So they are to be blamed as well. You can’t keep victim-blaming only.”
The actor added, “Some female actors actually said to me, ‘Look, we know that if we’re going to Saddar, we have to dress a certain way’, and I tell them to stop right there because that’s their opinion but even if someone shows up dressed a certain way, we need to remember that while Islam teaches women to do to pardah, it also teaches men to do pardah of the eyes. Why aren’t men doing so? You can’t say that the other person provoked them and so it’s not their fault. If the other person provoked them, why were they so easily provoked?”
Gill further thinks that people in the society often confuse religion with culture, “I don’t think women are saying give us the exact same rights as men, we’re saying at least give us what is rightfully ours. To tell us that we don’t have a right over our bodies, marriages or work, it needs to be understood that there are a lot of rights that our society doesn’t accept and that people have confused culture and religion. The things that aren’t culturally acceptable have been deemed religiously unacceptable as well.”
