hese women want to normalise incest in our society,” one of the four men casually remarked curling his handlebar moustache. They all stared derisively at the procession of Aurat March ’24 near National Press Club in Islamabad. They stood, with their arms folded, some 20 yards away from the marchers, justifying an older man who, with his phone attached to a tripod, filmed himself uttering profanities on these women, invoking clerical interpretations.
This year, the Aurat March Karachi page announced it would hold its annual march on Mother’s Day. It revived both its little support and tremendous resistance. Later that night, a group of young men, sitting around 1 am around a table outside a Karachi chai dhaba, agreed on how the unbridled use of social media had wreaked havoc on the traditional family system and modesty.
However, while talking about Aurat March, instead of being outright misogynistic, they affected some reasoning, having received a university education. They advocated for moderated equality, suggesting regulation on how far women should go.
While this conditional acceptance of equality, too, is rare, it reasserts the concept that equality, if at all, will be a grant and not a submission to a birthright. It will be an arbitrarily regulated grant to the people of gender so that they forever keep pandering to the dominant sex.
Who would regulate? the question naturally ensued. “Strong family system,” they concurred. Drawing a power drag on his cigarette, one chimed in, “But look at the women who work in the industries; they don’t complain while actually suffering the most. It’s these foreign-funded feminists that have it all and still have problems because the family system doesn’t let them spread wahiyati [indecency].”
Considered most progressive among them, the man received nods of approval, “han yar apna khana khud garam kro konsa mas’la hua yeh [true, ‘heat your own food is a non-issue],” remarked one, referring to a viral poster an individual carried during an Aurat March. That’s it. It is as if they settled on a trivial affair and moved on to discuss rather pressing matters, like Donald Trump, crypto currency and the Champions Trophy.
Social media and modesty
Zehra Ali*, in her early twenties, comes from a middle-income class family. She says social media helped her find solidarity. “I had internalised abuse within the typical family system that is regarded as cardinal,” she says. Ali says that it was like giving one person power and taking away accountability.
“It became a routine, and we got used to it.” But as soon as she could access the world outside of her own close-knit family with the help of Facebook, she learned that there were women, survivors and victims, who did talk about these chronic problems. Those who did, she learnt, were called feminists. Ali may have become a feminist herself in that very instance, but as she looks back, that decision was long pending. It was thanks to her passive and undiagnosed aggression against “the unchecked power commanded by some people, based on where and how they were born.”
In 2018, Karachi held its first Aurat March. Ali, now a vocal human rights activist, was one of its organisers.
Western agendas
Pointing out that there’s still no discourse on women’s rights, or even an accurate term for the word feminist in Urdu, Ali feels that there is still a long, steep way to travel till anything worth celebrating can be achieved.
“While trying to localise our movement, some people came up with the term niswani to describe a feminist, or huquq-i-niswan ki alambardar. But the former translates to feminine instead, and the latter is a long description, so you understand even today the literature written and produced outside must inform our local struggles, which becomes a convenient excuse for people to label us foreign-funded agenda.”
“Do you know what is rape in Urdu? It’s called ziadti, which means excess. How can such a heinous crime not have the right term for it? Why do we need so many words to explain that?”
Ali drew this context to explain why holding Aurat Marches and mobilising were important. “We just want to normalise diagnosing and talking about the prevalent domestic abuse, economic and social exploitation, harassment, climate change, and most importantly intersectionality, so that we can address them at some point, too,” she said.
“Each year, if you look at our agenda, you will see more or less the same demands but set in different themes for relevance.”
But then, who decides the agendas and the politics of these marches? What are the urgent grievances that need urgent remedies? What are the demands that need to be instantly fulfilled?
Some people seem to be readily taking offence at some women’s choice of placards, their demands, the ways they present them and the way they dress up at these marches. So much so that every year the amount of effort for the deliberations over manifesto design, the mobilising for crowds and for the successful execution of the march in the face of the potential threats are reduced to one random poster by an individual attendant of the march.
One placard is all it takes
The reductive approach sows deeper misunderstandings, the organisers agreed. Speaking to The News on Sunday, one of them rhetorically said that while it was common knowledge that women and transgendered people, just like men, have different minds, to each their own, men don’t seem to acknowledge this. “They club us all together and make it us vs them and about their fragile egos.”
“Would it not help the men, who we do realise are also the victims of this system, if we can abolish this dominance system together and set on the path of fairness across all sections, would it not be a better future?”
With each Aurat March, security concerns for the organizers have grown. Will they be attacked and hurled stones at? Will they be harassed by ‘content creators’? Can they be ambushed by people who will grope or brush against the women or launch into a mindless war of words with them? Will there be an opposing march of women on some religious agenda pitted against them, whose only goal would be to tame Aurat Marche?
The organisers have introduced scrutiny based on the previous experiences and vet the solo men, even the journalists who come to cover it. In 2022, many media people in Karachi got offended because they were not allowed entry into the Frere Hall or were only allowed if they checked certain boxes.
“They made the whole march about their ego and ran a smear campaign against us. If they are journalists, they should know why those security measures were there in the first place,” said a person overseeing security arrangements.
Demands and agenda
Rabiya Baqai*, another organiser, says she likes to remain cheek by-jowl with labour-class women. Her “loyalties lie with Aurat March unreservedly” but she never ceases to be critical of them.
Baqai comes from a relatively affluent family. She is mindful of her privilege, which she uses in her activism for causes like home-based workers’ rights, Karachi Bachao Tehreek and gender rights movements and protests.
To her, unionising and mobilising among the labour class women is of utmost importance. She says the AMs should be designed around some goal to achieve rather than being a mere festivity.
“While trying to localise our movement, some people came up with the term niswani to describe a feminist, or huquq-i-niswan ki alambardar but the former translates to feminine instead, and the latter is a long description, so you understand even today the literature written and produced outside must inform our local struggles, which becomes a convenient excuse for people to label us foreign-funded agenda.”
In the lead up to every Karachi Aurat March, some three months in advance, the volunteers and organisers huddle together and work out the themes.
“We come from different backgrounds. We join heads and like in any other movement, we get disappointed with the leadership when we think it doesn’t quite represent us.”
Referring to a recent Facebook post by sociologist Nida Kirmani, who reluctantly admitted that the marches “have gradually lost steam over the years” as they are “decreasing in size and energy,” Baqai said she agreed with the assessment.
Kirmani, a LUMS teacher, also wrote, “…for a movement to sustain itself and grow, it must continuously mobilise around particular issues or events that resonate with large numbers of people.”
Baqai says she reads a lot and talks to people to learn and evolve. While having this discussion, she brandished a book she had just recently finished, Feminism for the 99%: A manifesto, and quoted from it, “They want a world where the task of managing exploitation in the social whole is shared equally by ruling-class men and women.” Thereby suggesting that feminist literature of the working class is intersectional and wholesome while the liberal or white feminism is just a means to concentrate power and compete with male bosses, in who can exploit more and get away with it.
Ali also distinctively made a comment while talking about her inspirations, about how she prefers Arundhati Roy as a feminist icon, and recounted her quote, “There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless.’ There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”
She feels Roy’s literature drives the argument home. To her, it is neither shallow and pretentious nor a far-cry like most liberal feminism. “It is close to representing us all. She’s from India and we share so much, even if people are reluctant to admit that.”
Raison d’etre
“It’s our day. We decide how best to make use of it,” says Sajida Baloch, an Aurat March organiser from Keamari, an impoverished neighbourhood where the only abundance is the perennial issues inherent in poverty: labour exploitation, less-than-minimum wages, lack of most basic utilities, street crime, domestic violence and the cascading effects of these problems.
Keamari is flanked by industries, fishery, customs office and dockyard where Karachi’s riches are produced. The rich people hire – via sub-contractors – the cheap labour, which the residents of this area largely comprise.
Baloch says thanks to AMs the women have achieved progress like Transgender Rights Bill, Domestic Violence Bill, Cottage Industry Bill. “No matter what the people on the outside say, the marches have helped achieve things we couldn’t have achieved without their magnitude.
“Yes, the implementation is slow, but we generated enough force to get these things on paper in the face of all extremism and elitism.”
Baloch says all the women, at least in that neighbourhood and those in contiguous areas like Baldia and SITE area, sharing the grievances, came to her and had shown solidarity for the march.
“Many of them are stopped by their families because of the stereotypes spread against AMs, but even they do the volunteer work for the march in whatever capacity possible.”
According to Baloch, many of these women are in fact supported by their fathers and husbands. “They see how through these marches a fairer world is possible not just for the women but for these men, too, who are exploited by the same system.”
But then what about the dances and performances that strike society as rebellious, even indecent? A question normally follows, which is unhesitantly addressed: “That is an expression of pent-up anger. You have a problem with that. Don’t blame the victim; change the system!”
Minorities
The religious and gender minorities make for a sizable contribution to the overall volume of the marches, too.
Their grievances have been making it to the charter of demands every year in the AMs, for a few years. There are also separate marches for just their rights or to protest their afflictions–Moorat March and Minority Rights March.
Sijal Shafiq is a Christian member of AM, a regular Church-goer and a daughter and a wife to pastors. The 32-year underpins her argument of minority suffering by simply stating: You do see that women of privileged communities are unsafe. What do you reckon happens with religious and gender minorities’ women, who are literally eyed by every man without any remorse, or resistance from others?
“The whole ecosystem of how our society operates enables abuse against women, more so if the women are from minorities.”
For Shafiq, a pharmacist, being in the organising committee is reaffirming that she can now voice the personal lived experiences of herself and her community. Issues like forced marriage, grooming, forced religious conversion, blackmailing and mob threats, and shrouding personal vendetta as sacrilege are some of the top and prevalent ones, she said, adding that the marchers always try to keep them in the agendas.
The OG ‘mera jism, meri marzi’
Even the Christian women come to us over the famous slogan, mera jism, meri marzi and wonder if this implies debauchery. We explain what it postulates, Shafiq noted. “We tell them it’s one’s right over one’s body as to what they want to do professionally, socially, matrimonially and religiously, notwithstanding one’s political, religious or gender identities. Then they go like, ‘Oh, it’s so simple and basic. Why all the fuss then?’.”
The principle divides
In the course of the interactions for this piece, a pattern of internal ideological differences emerged, among the organisers and supporters of the feminist marches. Nadia Ali*, a researcher with a penchant for data crunching and ferreting out financial embezzlements, said she finds the fallibility factor in the AM leadership, just as much as in any other movement.
From failing to mobilise substantially on Afghan refugee refoulement to overcharging the refugees after offering on media pro bono services against their wrongful deportations, she says, these are rather more recent and just a few cases where people associated with AM could have done better.
These claims have echoed in various circles. Some went as far as to suggest that the movement was gradually transforming into liberal feminism, where the race was not to beat the exploitative system but to vie for equal opportunity dominance.
Local activists, choosing not to be named, with critical support for the marches, said that instead of marking a day with protests and performances, and feeling complacent about how “we defeated the patriarchal customs that chain us to gender roles, which is also equally important but had been in practice since the beginning, we should now mobilse for not the rudimentary things, but for a fairer system that enables equality and diversity.”
The modern critique of the liberal feminism also harshly dresses down the elitism and hunger for power consolidation within their own ilk, and talks relentlessly about intersectionality, so that instead of sounding misandrists, their movement can pave way for a system change hand in hand with the men who are similarly oppressed.
The men
While there’s some support for Aurat March from a tiny minority of local men, the large majority opposes it vehemently and buys credulously into every conspiracy theory to the extent that the women say it becomes almost impossible to engage in any discussion.
“They come from such high horses and claim to have all the logic in the world, but all they have are logical fallacies,” said an organiser who deals with the media.
She said, “they attack our character instead of responding with arguments; they have firm beliefs against us, which are not due to the strong grounds but because all other men are doing or saying it. When we respond to one question, they hop off to other things. Many women do the same because they also remain under strict influence of those men.”
For each pocket of men, the motive in opposing AM can be different. Talking to TNS, many said it was because of religion. A common response was, “God has defined the place and boundaries for women.” To this the women said that the men in charge don’t remember the clear instructions about inheritance laws explicitly laid out in the Quran or about their other responsibilities that they evade but when the women demand their due rights, they refer to the vaguest of interpretations, and use them to justify their own primitive instincts.
However, there are some who think they don’t like the idea of Aurat March because of their distasteful experiences. “Just like any other movement, it’s the race for control,” said Ahmed*. The women from the privileged backgrounds only treat the poor men harshly, who are already being treated abysmally in general. They feel strong by humiliating us, said the 25-year-old who works for a ride-hailing app now.” He said he used to be a driver for a family in Karachi’s affluent DHA.
He said his paymaster was an excessively rich woman whom he’d drive to all Aurat Marches and other such protests. In her own house, the maids, the gardeners, and he himself, were always at the mercy of her wrath.
“The people who worked for her included both women and men. None had any rights. So if such a person wants to be the poster woman of a movement and all her friends are its leaders, I know where it’s headed.”
What Ahmed described may not be untrue, and should be construed a valid experience, but to use one isolated example, even one that’s not too rare, to dismiss an entire movement that is wrought in struggle for the oppressed classes, would be disproportionate.
Compared to the power and influence the men have commanded traditionally, and the way crimes against women and transgenders are swept under the carpet, and how the men’s treatment of women in the family has never been a metric to judge their characters, the crimes committed by a small number of powerful women pale by a great margin, even if they are equally dismal and warranting introspection. Disqualifying their rightful claims reeks of complacency and scapegoating while the actual power structure remains unquestioned.
Contemporary feminist movements are already proposing a unified, global movement working against the concentration of power and a fair society. The concept is only achievable if “men listened and didn’t assume or jump to conclusions.”
Fasting Muslim and Christian AM supporters will be among the marchers in Islamabad come Women’s Day. They will likely push for their politics, fashioned in idealistic intersectionality, despite their shortcomings and strong opposition. The image of some men standing at a distance justifying an aged heckler, while churning out conspiracy theories of their own, is just as likely. One of these scenarios on March 8 could serve as a silver lining and sustain the hope for a better world.
The writer is a journalist mostly covering business, policy and social issues. He posts on X at @mhunainameen
