NEW DELHI — Her face was everywhere — on the news, at police stations and at the airports where the Pakistani government had put her on a list of the nation’s most wanted.

She has been accused of treason, though human rights defenders said that the allegations were bogus and that she was being targeted for highlighting abuses committed by Pakistan’s military. Security services were searching for her in every corner of the country, raiding her friends’ houses and closing in on her family.

But somehow Gulalai Ismail, a 32-year-old Pakistani women’s rights activist on the run, managed to slip through the dragnet last month and escape to America. She is now staying with her sister in Brooklyn and has applied for political asylum in the United States.

She is still worried about her parents back home and the underground network that secretly protected her as she moved from house to house, city to city, through countless police checkpoints, always wearing a veil over her face, her eyes barely visible.