Edhi: Father of the children with unknown parentage
Not all children enjoy the luxury of knowing their parents. Definitely not the two children, brother and sister, brought recently to the Kharadar center of Edhi Foundation in Karachi. They were left unattended by their parents, or relatives, in the vicinity of the charity’s ambulance center in the Orangi Town of Pakistan’s coastal metropolis, presumably with the hope that they will be picked up and taken care of. Thousands of other children with unknown parentage have been brought to the charity’s centers located across the country over the last many years.
The law of the land requires these children to establish their paternal parentage, to be able to get official identity documents required for almost all public and private services.
This feature explores the challenges of the children with unknown parentage, and how the existing laws and norms put them in a pickle.
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Nine children, covered in white sheets, are sleeping on two medium sized, colorful, floor mats placed in the middle of the long rectangular hall. Hands and feet of some of the children are visible, while the body shapes of others can be seen under the sheets. At the lower end of the hall are two windows allowing bright beams of light to filter in. Red colored cloth curtains are hanging on the windows, creating reddish ambience inside the hall. Some of the windows are closed, most probably permanently, guessing from the dust they have gathered. Long blades of two fans slowly rotate above, making a low, rumbling, sound, mixing with the cacophony outside.
We climbed circular narrow stairs, and are standing at the upper floor of the Edhi Foundation’s clinic-cum-office, located in in the middle of noisy and stuffy markets.
The disturbingly smelly roads leading to the clinic cum shelter home are littered with filth. Smoke emitted by several dozen vehicles stuck in a traffic jam also hangs in the air.
The cacophony created by the street vendors, shop keepers, people walking in the streets, and the blaring horns of vehicles stuck in the traffic jam, is unable to wake the children sleeping inside the slightly cooler hall. One of the children sleeping on the floor is awake. He looks at us blankly. Some of us notice a sadness in his eyes, and we all feel an uneasiness that is hard to describe in words.
These children sleeping on the floor are sheltered at the Edhi Center because the outside world is not considered to be safe for them. Some of them were abandoned by their families at birth, or a few months, years, after being born, while others are found stranded by the police and shifted to the safety of the shelter house established by Abdul Sattar Edhi, Pakistan’s most revered charity worker, who died on 8th July, 2016, five months before celebrating his 89th birthday.
Saira Umar Bakhsh, a nurse at the center, is holding one of the recently found children in her arms. The boy, wearing a checked, colorful, coat, sucks his thumb, without being perturbed by the curious gazes of the adult onlookers.
Both children don’t speak. Nothing is known about their parents or family backgrounds. They don’t have names, yet. Those who abandoned them did not leave any information behind. In a couple of weeks, the children will get new names, most probably chosen by Bilquis Edhi, the deceased Edhi’s wife, who resolutely stood with her husband through the thick and thin of a life dedicated to humanity.
When alive, Abdul Sattar Edhi’s name was used in the space left for the “Father’s Name” in multiple official documents related to the abandoned children. The National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA)had objections to this practice, however, because the database showed the late Edhi as the father of thousands of otherwise abandoned children. Sensing the unease of the NADRA officials, names of some senior staff members of the Edhi Foundation were used instead of their unidentifiable real parents.
The same will have to be done for these two kids.
Parentage of the abandoned, unwanted, children, has to be constructed, even if for the sake of official formality, because in official documents only a father’s name is a marker of identity. One wonders why we insist on imposing a paternal identity on the children who have been abandoned and left in the open, to be picked up by Edhi’s charity workers, or by the stray dogs that roam freely in our streets!
In India, efforts have been made to change the laws and traditions related to establishing a child’s parentage. The Supreme Court of India, in 1999, ruled that it is not mandatory to use only a father’s name in a child’s official document. The court decreed that a mother’s name may also be used as a marker of identity. The judgment was handed down, according to a Times of India article, in response to a plea submitted by writer Geeta Hariharan, because a signed application she submitted to open relief bonds for her minor son was refused by the Reserve bank of India, because she wasn’t the father.
In 2016, the Delhi High Court also decreed that a mother’s name is enough to establish parentage of the children, and that Passport issuing authorities need not to insist on getting name of the biological father of an applicant child.
Can Pakistan also review its laws and traditions related to establishing a child’s paternal identity? If yes, where to start?
Like other aspects of life, the Pakistani tradition of establishing a child’s identity through her father has roots in Islam, and is also a manifestation of the patriarchal nature of the society.
Laws related to guardianship of a child in Pakistan are described in “The Guardian & Wards Act 1890”, which is a legacy of the British colonialists. Laws related to issuance of Family Registration Certificates, and Child Registration Certificate, are explained in the NADRA Ordinance 2000. A Child Registration Certificate can be obtained by providing documented proof of child birth to Union Council officials.
Details about the paternity of abandoned children sheltered at the Edhi center, or the ones born to single mothers and sex workers, are not known. Thousands of children sheltered at the Edhi center faced a similar problem some years back, because they were unable to get their Computerized National Identity Cards, due to the absence of birth certificates or other documents establishing parentage. This was a huge issue, because thousands of the citizens of the country were remaining out of the national mainstream due to a legal glitch.
In 2014, Abdul Sattar Edhi approached the Supreme Court of Pakistan to address the issue once and for all. NADRA officials during a hearing of Edhi’s application told the Supreme Court that the process of registering children without known parentage had been simplified. ‘The registration of such children has been made easy, and, now, instead of going to the court for guardianship certificate to register every child, any head of an orphanage, registered under Orphanage Act with NADRA, may become the child’s guardian by providing an affidavit of Rs20, simply stating that the particulars of the child are true’, Afnan Kundi, the counsel for NADRA, told a three-member bench of the Supreme Court, as reported in daily The Nation, on May 30th, 2014. He also informed the court that decrees had been sought form religious scholars based in Saudi Arabia and Iran to resolve the issue in the light of Islam’s teachings.
While the NADRA official convinced the court, and the case was disposed of, the quick-fix solution has failed to resolve the issue completely.
“The children were initially registered in the name of my father,” said Faisal Edhi, a medium height bespectacled man, with an unkempt beard, and a soft tone, who now looks after the charity.
“But the NADRA people later complained that it is difficult for them to register thousands of children under one name. Many of the kids are now being registered under the names of senior officials of the Edhi Foundation”, he added.
The presumption behind the solution offered by NADRA is that all the children with unknown parentage are, or will be, at an orphanage or charity center. The question to ask, then, is what about the children with unknown parentage who are not sheltered at orphanages or foster homes?
Also, what about establishing parentage of the future children who will be born due to the advent of the In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF) technology, which entails fertilization by manually combining an egg and a sperm in a laboratory dish, and then transferring it to a uterus?
It appears that in the long run the state will have to reconsider the official markers of identity. The individuals with unknown parentage equally deserve to live with dignity and honor, without getting reminded, through official documents, about who they were born to, or not born to.
