Tag: pakistan aurat march

Despite Opposition, Pakistan’s ‘Aurat March’ Brings Women Together to Fight for Their Rights

On International Women’s Day, celebrated on March 8 every year, the women of Pakistan come together under the banner of the Aurat March to show solidarity and raise slogans for their equal treatment in the country.

On March 8, women around the world celebrate International Women’s Day; a day they call their own when they highlight their achievements and discuss issues still unresolved. The theme for Women’s Day this year is #BreakTheBias, underscoring the idea that it is not enough to acknowledge the existence of bias; action is necessary to achieve equality.  

While the rest of the world is devising strategies to improve the conditions of women, Pakistani women face the challenge of whether or not they will even be allowed to share their issues on a public forum on this day. 

Since 2018, Pakistani feminists have been organising large public demonstrations for Women’s Day, dubbed the ‘Aurat March’ (using the Urdu for woman). I have attended the last four marches, – the first two in Karachi and then in Lahore – joined at different times by my aunt and daughter, friends, husband and work colleagues. This year, I am away from Pakistan and will miss marching with my comrades in arms.

As the Aurat March has grown in popularity and impact, so, too, has opposition to it. In 2020, the organisers had to obtain a court order from a Lahore court to be allowed to go ahead.

People participating in the Aurat March in 2020. Photo: Sapan News Service.

The situation has cropped up again this year, with even more vehemence.

Pakistan’s minister for religious affairs even demanded that the country mark March 8 as ‘Hijab Day’; strange in a country where women are free to wear this headgear that is not part of the traditional garb. Moreover, there already is an annual World Hijab Day, started in 2013 and celebrated on February 1.

When women organised the first Aurat March in Karachi, no one expected such a large turnout in Pakistan’s largely patriarchal society. However, instead of the 200-300 participants expected, multitudes of women turned up at Karachi’s historic Frere Hall gardens.

It was amazing to see women from all walks of life come together to raise their voice for basic rights. The issues raised through placards and speeches included inheritance rights, the right to education, access to health services and equal wages, unpaid labour, domestic violence, demand for safety at work and in public spaces and more.

The March marked strong statement by a section of society, largely viewed as subservient and repressed.

Participants of the Aurat March holding placards bearing the issues they wished to speak against. Photo: Sapan News Service.

Many dismissed the massive turnout as a one-time fluke. However, women took it as a wake-up call to continue working on breaking barriers that have held us back in many domains. Quickly, conservatives deemed the movement as a ‘malaise, spread across Pakistan’.

The event got bigger in subsequent years. Women emerged in throngs to march in multiple cities – Karachi, Hyderabad, Lahore, Multan, Islamabad, even Hunza valley. Men, too, began to join the event with their families and the numbers have continued rising, despite the increasing threats the event receives from conservative elements. 

Men have started participating in the Aurat March as well. Photo: Sapan News Service.

The slogans raised at the March since its inception have created a furore because they “challenge dominant norms and gender roles by calling for autonomy, equality, freedom and justice,” according to Daanika R. Kamal, PhD scholar at the School of Law, Queen Mary University of London.

In addition to the ones detailed above, the participants of the March raise sensitive issues such as child rape and sexual abuse, honour killings, transgender rights and so on, as reflected by the manifestos and charters released by the organisers, which vary slightly in each city the March is held in.

This year, the Aurat March in Karachi is calling for social security, demanding Ujrat, Tahaffuz, Sukoon (Wages, Security, Peace). Lahore is focusing on ‘repair and reform’, calling for justice for rape victims, reproductive health and transgender rights and Multan is calling for ‘reimagining the education system’.

The opponents of the March seem totally unaware of these issues and refuse to ever engage in dialogue about them.

There was great opposition to one of the slogans raised at the 2019 March: ‘Mera jism, meri marzi’ (My body, my choice). This call to end gender violence, sexual harassment and bonded labour was dismissed by opponents of the March as a call for ‘sexual libertarianism’. However, women continued to defiantly chant the slogan at subsequent events. Celebrities, such as actor Mahira Khan, even came out in support of the March, taking to Facebook to explain what the slogan meant.

“I feel that the Aurat March has changed the narrative about women’s rights,” says performing artist Sheema Kermani, one of the founding members of the March. “It has shaken the very foundations of patriarchy and brought the dialogue on women’s rights into every home, every family, in offices and on the roads.”

Another allegation that opponents level at the March is that it is unsafe. However, I, personally, have found it one of the safest public spaces in Pakistan. No incidents of jostling and ‘eve-teasing’ have ever been reported from these events.

Aurat March demonstrations are inclusive events attended by women from different backgrounds and sharing divergent thoughts and beliefs. Large numbers of women in burqa and hijab march in harmony with women in shalwar kameez; some with dupattas, some without. There are women in saris and in there are women in jeans. Everyone is welcome. It provides a chance to engage in dialogue and understand different perspectives. That is how civilised societies find solutions to the problems they face.

And yet, not only has the March been met with increasing opposition, threats to the event have only continued to grow, reflecting a deepening societal divide on the topic of moral and social values.

False allegations and social media disinformation campaigns are being used to try and discredit the event, such as photoshopped placards with distorted the messages. Last year’s March saw one of the worst examples of this: A doctored a video of the Karachi March was circulated making it seem as if the participants had committed “blasphemy” – a charge that in Pakistan can lead to the accused being killed by vigilantes. It wasn’t until Geo TV anchor Shahzaib Khanzada investigated the issue and showed how the video was falsified that the controversy died down. 

The Aurat March has proved to be a phenomenal success, forcing society to acknowledge the efforts of women and sparking nationwide debates about the rights women are entitled to, but denied. 

The women of Pakistan want to develop collective communities of care, building on existing support. Why is it such a bad idea to build supportive communities that hold themselves accountable, have mechanisms to address abuse, support victims of violence, and create awareness around health issues and legal rights?

Why do many in Pakistan see their demands: access to safe public spaces; the right to voice their views; to receive equal wages; to respect all belief systems; to integrate trans individuals as useful members of society; in short, a claim to basic human rights, as a threat to society?

Those who oppose Aurat March must realise that it is important for all of us to work together to break the biases that hold back half our population. 

Nadra Huma Quraishi is an educationist and a member of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. 

This article was produced by Sapan News Service. 

Fragile Egos, Fragile States: COVID-19 Doesn’t Care

Two demonstrations involving Indians and Pakistanis in Massachusetts once again foregrounded the common issues that the people of the two countries face.

The round red brick pit at Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a favourite venue for street musicians, meet-ups, and demonstrations. Two recent demonstrations there involved Indians and Pakistanis, on February 29 and March 8 respectively, shortly before the coronavirus scare limited public gatherings.

The Indian demonstration was a multi-faith prayer and a protest against the violence in Delhi targeted against Indian Muslims. The Pakistani one was in solidarity with the women’s demonstrations, Aurat March, held in cities around Pakistan for International Women’s Day.

Having just returned from Pakistan, I attended both demonstrations. Winter still eclipsed spring. In below freezing air dissecting gloves, boots, hats and coats, people stood their ground doggedly with placards calling for peace and justice.

“Dravidians against Brahmanism” read a placard at the first event. Other placards proclaimed the word “peace” in different languages including Urdu, Hindi, Bangla, Hebrew.

A Wellesley College student at the second event said her mother asked her not to go because of the now-infamous slogan ‘Mera jism meri marzi’ (my body, my choice). She wrote it in Urdu on a placard she was making as we waited for people to show up.

I wrote ‘Mubarak ho, larki hai’ (Congratulations, it’s a girl) on my placard, a slogan used by a young woman and her husband at the Islamabad Aurat March. She has been putting off getting pregnant because she’s an athlete. The couple held up this placard celebrating a daughter’s birth in a society that pressurises women to start families but doesn’t rejoice if the baby is a girl.

Another mantra, ‘Dil mein beti, will mein beti’ (daughter in heart, daughter in the will) sounded good so I added that to my placard too. Then drew a clenched fist with bangles and came up with this slogan: ‘ChooriyaN hain, beri nahi’ (they’re bangles, not shackles). A familiar taunt flung at men perceived to be behaving in a ‘feminine way is ‘Chooriyan pehni hain?’ (wearing bangles?)

Beena Sarwar’s poster.

At the Indian event, I was one of the few Pakistanis, standing in solidarity with activists fighting the menace of retrogressive forces in India. Pakistanis have been fighting the mirror images of these forces for the past three decades or more. Yet many on either side prefer to point fingers across the border, looking away from oppression at home. It’s a matter of degrees, at different times.

The rights movements are inclusive, for and by people of different faiths, professions, ethnicities, genders, and socio-economic classes. In a broader sense, they counter injustice, oppression and fascism in various guises.

In India, rights activists stand not just for Muslims but also Dalits, Kashmiris, and other oppressed communities. One activist, born a South Indian Hindu, posts a countdown of the days since the Kashmir lockdown to WhatsApp groups and Facebook pages. He does this on a daily basis despite “warnings” (the platforms are now accessible to people in Kashmir). A couple of years ago, he got a little girl in Kerala to sing Pakistan’s national anthem, and a little girl in Lahore to sing India’s national anthem. How subversive can you get?

In Cambridge, two women at the February 29 demonstration recite the powerful poem ‘Sab Yaad Rakha Jayega’ (Everything Will Be Remembered). Aarti Sethi and Rajita Menon are not Muslim but they passionately owned the words written by the Indian Muslim poet Aamir Aziz after the mob violence against Jawaharlal Nehru University students in January 2020.

[Aarti Sethi and Rajita Menon recite Aziz Ansari’s poem Sab Yaad Rakha Jaye Ga (Everything Will Be Remembered): Relevant beyond India. Video: Beena Sarwar]

“This violence is anti-Muslim but it’s also anti-people,” says Dalit rights activist Suraj Yengde, author of the recently published bestseller Caste Matters.

Hypernationalists in India call rights activists traitors and “Pakistan-lovers” (that’s a bad thing?). There is similar propaganda against rights activists in Pakistan, including the Aurat March organisers.

An Indian woman I meet at the Pakistani demonstration could relate to the Aurat March agenda – equal rights for women, equal pay for equal work, end violence against women, end sexual harassment. But this agenda gets overshadowed by the ‘Mera jism meri marzi’ slogan, MJMM, from last year’s Aurat March, bandied out of context on social media and picked up by mainstream media. In much of public perception, the controversial slogans define the demonstrations for women’s rights. Hence the Wellesley student’s mother’s concern.

Controversial the slogan may be, but it was visible at Aurat Marches in several cities around Pakistan. The cheeky rallying cry recently inspired a rap song by the Chitrali-origin singer FiFi.

This defiance through music, humour and peaceful collective action is up against the status quo everywhere, including patriarchal systems of injustice and hypernationalist, militarist narratives. The upholders of these narratives like to point fingers at the ‘other’ while ignoring excesses and injustices at home.

And now they are in denial about the coronavirus outbreak. Whatever their religion, each claims their faith gives them immunity from the illness.


The coronavirus doesn’t discriminate between religion, gender or other divisions. It has brought home a universal truth: Human beings are created equal. It is the power elites and the power structures they create that oppress. At the end of the day, it is this Goliath of oppression that the Davids of the world are up against.

David won that battle. The struggle continues.

Beena Sarwar is a journalist, editor and filmmaker. She tweets @beenasarwar. Her website can be found here.

‘Patriotic Trolling to Astro-Turfing’: Lessons From Maria Ressa on Dealing With Online Hate

The award-winning journalist’s recent talk also holds the key to the unceasing hate received by the organisers of the Aurat March in Pakistan.

In her 34 years of reporting, Maria Ressa has “changed nothing” about how she works. What has changed is the unprecedented rise in the targeted abuse she faces. Speaking at Harvard University recently at a session organised by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, she unpacks a pattern that is visible all the way from her native Philippines to the United States.

There is this “new weapon against journalists”, says the award-winning journalist who was with CNN for 20 years as bureau chief in Manila, then Jakarta, and as lead investigative reporter on terrorism in Southeast Asia. She returned to the Philippines in 2012 to help found the media start-up Rappler.com.

What Ressa terms as the global phenomenon of “patriotic trolling” will sound familiar to any journalist who pushes after the facts just about anywhere in the world, including Pakistan and other South Asian countries.

The particular targeting of women could in fact be termed “patriarchal trolling”.

The strategy, says Ressa, is to “pound them”. It starts with a bottom-up attack: “astro-turfing”, fake grass that looks real. The fertiliser is social media. There is a “scorched earth policy” – silence the opponents, leave them incapable of action.

Maria Ressa unpacks the new weapon against journalists and women: A global phenomenon

Extensive data examination reveals that “26 fake accounts can influence three million others… It’s a full-time job”. One of the slides Ressa presents shows the multiple times that the same message has been copy-pasted as a comment — up to 40-80 times a day.

Another slide shows how the networks spread as more and more people repeat the falsehoods. In the age of social media, “a lie told a million times becomes a fact”.

Also read: Do Women Journalists Have it Harder in India?

This info-ecosystem creates a bandwagon. Everyone believes in the “corruption” of X politician or the “foreign agenda” of Y journalist – and “so you must also”. The campaign against Rappler led to it being banned from the palace two years ago, and subsequently even from any private function that the president or his allies were attending.

To understand the phenomenon, Rappler uses natural language processing (NLP), a branch of artificial intelligence that deals with the interaction between computers and humans. Ressa shares the findings in a slide showing the intensity of online attacks correlating to the political timeline. Another slide features the three social media accounts that in a targeted way influenced thousands of others.

Pounding: A timeline of attacks on Ressa/Rappler

The one-sidedness of the fight is evident in a slide showing how heavily the social media activity is weighted towards the pro-Duterte camp. The only time it evened out was the first time Ressa was arrested, in February 2019.

That’s when ‘normal’ people who were “moved enough to not look away” began to share information about the issue from various news sources. Today too, “people who care about facts, about democracy, can’t afford to look away”.

There was another time that both sides evened out, Ressa corrects herself: When U2 performed in the Philippines and Bono criticised the ongoing violation of human rights in the country. She modestly does not mention that she was among the Filipina women honoured at the concert. In fact, Bono mentioned her more than once: “Maria Ressa is an incredible woman but the extraordinary thing is even Maria Ressa will say it’s not about individuals, it’s about collective action”.

Another strategy to silence dissent is to degrade women as sexual objects. The end goal is to intimidate and wear down the target. At one point, Ressa received 90 hate messages an hour.

Hard work and consistency: Despite setbacks, Rappler’s finances have risen, with diversified sources.

Social media campaigns become a foreshadowing of action against journalists. Ressa has experienced this first-hand, having been arrested twice. Her journalism demanding accountability from power didn’t go down too well with the tough-talking Rodrigo Duterte, mayor of Davao City for two decades, known as “the Punisher” because of the extrajudicial killings of over 1,000 suspected criminals that took place under his watch. He has denied having allowed the killings but has also at times bragged about them.

Duterte swept into power following presidential elections in 2016. His presidential campaign was riddled with obscenities, including boasts about his affairs and use of Viagra, and jokes about raping a missionary.

The hashtag #arrestMariaRessa began circulating a month later. It gained traction around the mid-term elections in 2019. Ressa was arrested shortly afterwards. “I could have been released on bail but they kept me overnight just to show their power”.

In any case, “you don’t need to go to prison to be imprisoned”. There is a culture of fear that prevents journalists from doing their jobs. This is true not just in the Philippines.

As many as 88% of Pakistani journalists who participated in a survey on self-censorship said they were most likely to hold back information related to religious and security matters in their reporting and personal conversations.

Another target in the Philippines is opposition senator, human rights activist and lawyer Leila de Lima, critical of Duterte’s drug war. Two weeks after the hashtag #arrestleiladelima appeared, she was arrested, 24 February 2017. She continues to remain in detention, “pronounced guilty” even without a trial.

De Lima holds she is a victim of political persecution with her right to due process violated, and the personal attacks against her distorting public opinion.

The widespread perception that de Lima is corrupt, points out Ressa, is not proof of corruption. “She has never been allowed to present her case”.

But public opinion, as De Lima told Al Jazeera, makes it easier for the Philippines government to “manipulate” the legal system and justify her detention. (Sound familiar, Pakistan?)

There is also a view that tech enabled the wave of misogynistic strongmen elected in different countries around the world over the past years.

Duterte, as De Lima asserted, “Hates strong women who stand up to him and fight him”.

‘Fight back, our weapons are facts.’

Strong women are a threat everywhere. In Pakistan, an example of tech being used to take things out of context and make extreme narratives the norm is how a few controversial placards from the previous Aurat March commemorating International Women’s Day are being used to try and stop the event or intimidate its supporters.

Organisers of the march have faced massive abuse online. There are petitions in court demanding that the march be cancelled for being ‘anti-Islam’ or ‘westernised’. Fortunately, the courts have the sense to discard these. One judge who added that the slogans be ‘within the bounds of decency’ sparked criticism for overstepping his legal bounds and venturing into ‘moral policing’.

Also read: BJP Leaders Distort Speech by The Wire’s Arfa Khanum Sherwani to Attack CAA Protests

March organisers are also facing a backlash after a screenplay writer’s vile language against feminist activist Marvi Sirmed, not an organiser of the march but a supporter, when both were part of a panel on a television talk show discussing one of the controversial slogans. In the subsequent online war, the writer’s name started trending rather than Aurat March and its manifesto.

After someone shared Sirmed’s cell number on Facebook, she began receiving 60 calls a minute, her WhatsApp choking with thousands of message notifications.

On the face of it, such attacks, on journalists, women and human rights activists, seem insurmountable and overwhelming. But as Ressa and Rappler’s experience shows, when you decide to fight, they are don’t have to be.

Being organised and fighting back is key. When the onslaught began and Rappler’s finances took a hit, the team leadership decided to chop their own salaries. Well-wishers chipped in for the $ 40,000 a month racked up in legal fees. Rappler’s finances, illustrated in a slide shared by Ressa, started becoming more diversified. The share of advertising is decreasing, and more money is coming in from other sources. Many of the news group’s founders, including Ressa, who had invested their own money to begin with, are putting earnings back and giving equal amount bonus to the team – Rapplers as they are called.

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”, assets Maria Ressa, repeating the line like a mantra more than once during her presentation.

What we need to do, she says, is “combine investigative follow up with tech, and create communities of action”. Rappler came in with a news agenda, taking on the issue of climate and good governance, following up with the Sustainable Development Goals. “We can’t just play a defensive game. We have to create a new eco-system”.

To the question of journalism and activism, she comments that in the old days there were strict rules about keeping reporting and activism separate. After being arrested, she became aware of the problems of false equivalence – one side weighted heavily against the other.

Also read: Stories Behind the Story: Maria Ressa and Why Journalists Need Protection

This is something we in Pakistan realised during the Zia dark years. Journalists can’t sit on the fence when democracy is in danger.

Ressa agrees. “In the battle for truth, you have to say who lies”.

The bottom line now? Fight back. Stand against bullies. After the atomic boming of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world came together to rebuild them. “An atom bomb has gone off in our eco-system”. We have to rebuild it, and come together globally, adds Ressa, vowing, “We will hold the line”. She’s not alone.

The good news is that it’s not just fake news, outrage and anger that spread fast. The second biggest thing that people like to share is inspiration.

Courage is contagious. Rappler is going with the hashtag #CourageOn. So am I.

Beena Sarwar is a journalist, editor and filmmaker. She can be reached through her website, ‘Journeys to Democracy’ at www.beenasarwar.com or through Twitter @beenasarwar. A slightly different version of this piece was first published in The News International, Pakistan.