THE TV was on in the background when the finance minister delivered his budget speech. The usual noise: opposition members on their feet, slogans, desk-thumping. I wasn’t listening. Then two words cut through it: ‘sanitary pads’. I put down what I was doing; the government was removing the tax on sanitary products. The finance minister had said ‘sanitary pads’ on the floor of the National Assembly, on live television, with the ease of a man reading out grain prices. The information minister then hailed the decision.

I thought immediately of my late editor, Tahir Mirza. In 2024, I wrote in this space about the complaints we received when a sanitary pad advertisement ran on the back page of a mid-week magazine I edited at this paper. Readers had written in. Colleagues had raised eyebrows. Mirza sahib took the calls in his stride. People need time to accept change, he said. The noise in the Assembly hasn’t changed. The comfort with which those two words were said has.

The change did not come from government enlightenment. It was dragged in. In February, a colleague interviewed Mahnoor Omer, the young lawyer who took the government to court over the tax in September last........

© Dawn