Ab ye hi reh gaya tha?
Pakistani dramas have a strict formula. To make sure that a drama turns into a hit. They try not to even think about emphasising the understanding of social issues or for once making a drama that is not about sass bahu jhagray. The problem is that they include scenes like women being abused, exploited, and even flip the narrative by trying to justify that women make up harassment scandals just to entrap men.
‘Mujhay Pyaar Hua Tha’ decided to take the cake after showing two cousins getting married, a weird love triangle, father getting paralysed after daughter tries to rebel, now the good-at-heart male lead is getting trapped by another woman, who falsely accuses him of harassing her, because obviously women don’t get sexual harassed or assaulted in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. They just make up stories, right? So wrong.
In this scene, a woman shows up to Saad’s office, threatening him that she has personal pictures of his wife Maheer (played by Hania Amir) and her ex-lover Areeb (Zaviyaar Nauman Ijaz), which she will leak on social media unless Saad visits her house. When he arrives there, she hands him coffee which she had drugged with something that makes him unconscious. When Saad awakens, the woman calls the police and re-arranges the scene to make it look like she was sexually assaulted, and Saad is arrested and taken away.
We hope that the makers of ‘Mujhay Pyaar Hua Tha’, its writer and the lead actors understand that sexual harassment is a serious crime, and not a made up fantasy that women endorse just to make money and trap innocent men. If it’s so hard for the lead actors to understand why being well aware about social issues is important when working in dramas, take an example from Mawra Hocane when she revealed that she refused to work in the drama ‘Qisa Meherbano Ka’ which was depicting marital rape, that after discussing this issue with the producer Momina Duraid and the director Iqbal Hussain, they all agreed to re-write the scene and then shot it.
Twitter users had to condemn Pakistani dramas for once more proving that we could take one step forward, but in exchange we’ll go several steps back.
“It’s extremely irresponsible to show false rape allegations in countries with rape culture,” one user wrote. “I hope makers realise they are feeding victim complex of Desi men for lukewarm twists.”