A YOUNG Asian woman and Labour candidate in the forthcoming council elections has revealed the difficulties she experienced when she stood in past local elections.

Reporter LIAM MURPHY takes a closer at the difficulties facing candidates from minority groups.

SEXUAL threats, being spat on and having her election leaflets stolen have not stopped a 29-year-old Asian woman from standing for the Labour party in Blackburn in this year's local elections.

Saima Afzal has had to put up with an abusive husband from an arranged marriage, their separation and being a single mother within the largely traditional Asian community in Blackburn.

Now working as a community development officer and in a town centre restaurant, Saima is back in the fray having been chosen by the Labour party to fight the Beardwood with Lammack ward. She will challenge the popular Conservative councillor Sheila Williams, who won the seat with 2,322 votes compared to Labour's 694 votes in 1997.

But a leading national group which has helped Asian women facing discrimination for 21 years has warned Saima she will have a difficult job ahead of her.

Pragna Patel, of the Southall Black Sisters, said: "It's a fact that the majority of community leaders are men from socially conservative backgrounds. They wield the power. Asian women in positions of leadership are quite rare."

She added: "Although you can point to the subcontinent -- and there have been very strong women in the highest positions there -- the reality here is very removed from them. Certainly in this country we have yet to see many Asian women come forward, particularly those who do not conform."

Saima's family moved to England from Pakistan in 1976, and at 21 she returned to Pakistan to marry and for a few years split her time with her husband and new-born son Aeman between there and Spain, suffering the abuse from her husband in silence to try and keep her family together.

But when Saima's father discovered what had been happening to his daughter he acted sharply.

Saima said: "My dad saw him being violent towards me and threw him out. Up until then I had been afraid to tell my family because the community expects you to work these things out. I felt bad for my dad because he had put me in that marriage because he thought it was best for me. But when he realised what was happening, he took me out of it."

She said she was grateful to her parents and her family is "one hundred per cent" behind her. Saima said: "I know sometimes my father disagrees with me, but he supports me and has never been against me.

"I think my family have recognised the mistakes of our culture and learned from them. It's not religion -- there is nothing about suppression in our religion."

But Saima nevertheless insisted she respected choices freely made by women. She said: "But the interpretation by some has led to the view that women's choices should be restricted.

"It was partly because of this that made me angry that women in our culture are living like this because they don't know any other way."

Although she had long been a member of the Labour Party, it was in 1999 she was selected by the party to stand in Corporation Park.

This is when the pressure on her not to stand for the council began.

Saima said: "I have never said it was just the Pakistani community which was against me standing for election, but I believe there are certain members of the Asian community who are strongly resistant to change."

Saima said: "I became involved because of my experiences and because of my beliefs about the role women should play in society. Democracy is a way of fighting suppression."

She admits this has brought her 'nothing but grief,' but compares her struggle to the suffragettes fighting for votes for women.

As the first Muslim woman selected Saima faced prejudice from her own community.

She said: "People use me as a weapon against my father. Members of the community would complain to my dad about how I was dressed, such as my coat was not long enough, or I was not wearing a headscarf.

"Or that I was talking to a man, or even smiling at a man. They would say I was just like 'one of them,' meaning a white person."

She also received threats of hate mail about her being sent to prominent members of the community and silent phone calls from withheld phone numbers. When she went into the town centre, male Asian youths would spit on her.

She even had her election leaflets stolen and dumped across the town, with one of them pushed back through her letterbox with sexual threats on it, while she was fighting for election in Shadsworth ward in 2000.

She said: "There are so many people who said to my dad that she should not be in politics because she is a woman."

Abdul Hamid Chowdry, Blackburn Racial Equality Council director, said: "Some Muslims, particularly in the Pakistani community, may feel uneasy about a woman standing for election, but we must not forget that India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka have had women political leaders."