Courtesy of Zulfiqar Mannan

Zulfiqar “Zulfi” Mannan ’20 in late August returned home from a Lahore party to find out Pakistani authorities were ready to arrest them for violating the country’s obscenity laws.

Mannan and best friend, bandmate and fellow-Yale alumna Kc Odesser ’20, had held a queer-inspired photoshoot in front of a nationalist monument, inspiring intense backlash from the country’s conservatives. Despite the conservative fracas, Mannan’s bail was confirmed Oct. 2 after numerous bureaucratic delays. The confirmation does not mean Mannan has been acquitted. But according to their lawyer, Hadi Ali Chattha, this ruling indicates that Mannan will not face jail time.

“The case effectively decided whether we want the state to decide for us what we can and can not wear in public,” said Chattha, the founder of Fair Trial Defenders Legal Aid Cell. “It’s about police doing moral policing and how a radical, religious, nationalist group can steer what the priorities are for law enforcement agencies.”

Mannan, who is originally from Pakistan, and American native Odesser were both working as high school counselors in Islamabad and Lahore, respectively. The two had held a queer-coded photoshoot in June in front of Islamabad’s Quaid e Azam monument to promote their band Mystical Shayari’s newest single, “Disco Rani.”

For the first few weeks after their photo and music video shoots, Mannan said, everything seemed fine. That was until July, when a prominent internet trolling cell — a phenomenon covered in Al Jazeera documentary “War, Lies and Hashtags: Pakistan’s Twitter Battles” — picked up on the photos and criticized them for misrepresenting Pakistani values.

But Pakistani values were central to Mannan and Odesser’s choice to shoot in front of the Quaid e Azam landmark, which spells out the national tenets of faith, unity and discipline on the side of a hill, they said.

‘We wanted to claim ownership behind the idea of Pakistan as these queerish individuals in these colorful outfits that weren’t objectively disrupting Pakistani social norms of nudity but were so colorful and queer that they were going to still be perceived as queer-coded in a negative light,” Mannan said.

In the photoshoot, Mannan donned an iridescent skirt, large earrings and makeup, instead of clothing traditional for male-presenting individuals.

Still, the Twitter cell’s comments blew up, and prominent right-wing journalist Ansar Abbasi — who Mannan compared to Breitbart columnists in the United States — tweeted to #ArrestTheCouple.

Mannan, Odesser and their families then began receiving rape threats, death threats and doxxing messages. Mannan temporarily lost their job with Teach for Pakistan, and after a primetime news network picked up the incident on Aug. 3, Mannan and Odesser went into hiding in a safe house in Lahore.

Though internet trolls targeted both members of Mystical Shayari, Mannan said that throughout the ordeal, they were primarily focused on Odesser’s well being.

“I made a promise to Kc’s mom that she would be 100 percent safe in Pakistan, so our first priority was getting her out and back to the States,” they said.

Odesser went back to New York, her home state, and Mannan remained at the safe house for several more weeks before returning to stay with their family in Lahore. Both thought the matter had died down until police arrived to apprehend Mannan as part of a first incident report under Section 294 of Pakistan’s Penal Code, a charge penalizing individuals for obscenity.

Immediately, Mannan secured protective bail and then later pre-arrest bail, so they did not spend time in jail. The trial determined if the bail would stand, not whether or not Mannan was guilty, despite popular conversation centering on imprisonment. The hashtag #FreeZulfi was trending on Twitter at the end of August, even though authorities never actually arrested Mannan or sent them to jail.

Prominent Pakistani celebrities such as comedian Shehzad Ghias, actress Meesha Shafi and writer Fatima Bhutto all came out in support of Mannan.

“What exactly is Zulfi guilty of? Freedom of expression?” a Twitter user shared on August 24. “This is so callous and a blatant disregard of due process rights #freezulfi.”

Mannan later discovered that the state was not the one to leverage the charge against them. Rather, a right-wing private citizen had made the complaint.

From the opposite side of the ocean, Odesser waited for news from her best friend and platonic “soulmate.” The two met through mutual friends during their first year at Yale, and collaborated on several protests and performances, including a 2019 demonstration outside of global affairs professor Emma Sky’s “Middle East Politics” class and a banner display during Yale Law School professor Akhil Amar’s ’80 LAW ’84 “Constitutional Law” course, which read, “the U.S. Constitution is the law of stolen land … upheld by Yale rapists.” They graduated together in 2020 and started their band then.

“Our freedom in Mystical Shayari is really wrapped up in each other,” Odesser told the News.  “Even if I were to be free, physically free, when this is happening to us both and Zulfi is bearing the brunt of it, neither of us is really free. I just had to find reasons to be confident, reasons to be hopeful, trust in God, trust in our art, trust in the support of the people to pull us through this.”

Odesser said she tried not to worry, since attorneys told her there was no legal precedent for jailing an individual for alleged nudity under Section 294, which Chattha confirmed to the News. Odesser maintains that the two were fully clothed, just queer-presenting.

Odesser’s hopes prevailed. On Oct. 2, after months of waiting and a four-hour court battle, Mannan’s bail was confirmed. Chattha explained that the opposing counsel was “furious” because a bail confirmation essentially guarantees that Mannan will walk free.

“In my expert opinion and the nature of the allegation, once the accused gets confirmed bail in such a case the case is practically over, as Zulfi’s attendance is no more needed, and it will fizzle out on its own with little to no involvement by us lawyers,” he wrote in a message to the News. 

The judge, who Mannan characterized as “sweetly paternalistic,” made Mannan promise to refrain from inciting future incidents in the future, but they have no intention of ceasing their activism. Odesser intends to return to Pakistan in the coming weeks.

During their time at Yale, Mannan studied English, participated in the Yale Multidisciplinary Academic Program in Human Rights and worked as a WKND staffer for the News. They were a member of Morse College.