.sethimirajee reports from the Aurat March, an annual protest seeking to expand the contours of the discourse on Pakistani women’s freedoms—social, economic, political.
When I was ten years old, a man undid his pants in front of me and began masturbating, in a busy alley in Lahore’s Main Market. I was sitting in the back of my aunt’s open-cabin van. What amazes me is that he did this in one of the most crowded places in the city. As he crept close to me, penis in fist, I scrambled off the van and sprinted into my aunt’s furniture store in Raja Center. Days later, I confided in my grandmother.
In 2018, Aurat March, a local version of the Women’s March, attempted to expand the contours of the discourse on women’s freedoms—social, economic, political. Every year since then, major Pakistani cities hold Aurat March in the face of much criticism. In fact, the march has become so controversial that merely participating in it casts one as provocative.
Just a few days before the Karachi march, police had attacked Aurat March protesters in Islamabad with batons. A photo of the activist Farzana Bari removing barbed wire with her bare hands went viral. In Lahore, the caretaker government had agreed to provide security to the marchers but refused to provide a no-objection certificate—official permission to hold a rally—for fear of clashes with a religious party’s rival “Modesty March.
The marchers of the eighties didn’t elicit the kind of visceral reaction that we do today because they weren’t cutting so close to the bone: they weren’t challenging men’s deepest identities and appearing to “emasculate” them. Today’s societal pressures have been made worse by the immediacy of social media, which elicits out-of-proportion responses.
“Yes, absolutely,” Muhammad Ali said. “Who has taken their clothes off?” he asked the reporter. “Show me. Show me. No one.”“Today is Women’s Day,” Muhammad Ali retorted. “Let them have their day.”“Right. That’s why you called them worms.”
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