For the organisers of the annual women’s rights demonstration known as Aurat (Women) March, it had been a stressful few days leading up to the event, held this year to coincide with Mother's Day in Pakistan’s largest city. 

As always, it was a struggle to obtain the no-objection certificate known as NOC, a colonial-era administrative permit required for public gatherings. 

Four days before the event, when organisers arrived at the Karachi Press Club to hold a press conference about this, police apprehended classical dancer and theatre activist Sheema Kermani, one of the movement’s leaders. She is also a leading voice for peace with neighbouring India and in the region.

Half a dozen other women activists were similarly detained. Videos of police grabbing the 75-year old Kermani by her arms and shoving her into a police van went viral, sparking massive outrage in Pakistan as well as across the region and in the diaspora. 

Brushes With Local Administration

The detained activists were released a few hours later. The Sindh government distanced itself from the incident and suspended three police officers, a move that many saw as traditional scapegoating rather than accountability. The question of who ordered the arrests remains unclear. 

“We've always tried to be peaceful citizens; we have had our marches peacefully. We have tried to do things in a proper way and that's why we applied for NOC,” Kermani told Sapan News at the Aurat March when it finally took place on Sunday 10 May. 

Aurat March Islamabad organisers typically face similar brushes with the local administration. Denied a permit this year, they proceeded anyway on 8 March. A small group of women who gathered in a central neighbourhood in the capital were detained and held late into the night without access to lawyers or family. Those detained included teenagers as well as veteran activists. 

Following the widespread outrage about Kermani and the Karachi activists’ detention, authorities finally granted the NOC to Aurat March – largely due to international concern, believes Kermani. “I've had calls from all over the world,” she said.

However, the permission was granted with 28 terms and conditions that Kermani said she was “absolutely shocked and horrified” by. Calling it “almost fascistic,” she said it was designed to instill fear and “weaken our support base”. 

In a video recorded after her release, Kermani asked progressive women parliamentarians to support Aurat March’s demands for women's rights. “Now it's up to them”, she added.

Kermani said that Aurat March gives its platform “to all the oppressed communities, including those who talk about enforced disappearances” and will continue doing so. 

She also called for the release of activists including lawyer Imaan Mazari and Baloch rights activist Mahrang Baloch who remain incarcerated. “These are women who are fighting women's causes. It's the mothers, daughters, and wives of Baloch men who are talking about their ‘missing’ beloved men.”

Dozens of working and middle-class women, non-binary individuals, and male allies poured into the tented seaside venue in the scorching heat. Organisers said the choice of venue was based on requests from working-class women around Karachi, many of whom had never been to the beach before and wished to celebrate their togetherness there.

 

The turnout, said Kermani, reaffirmed decades of struggle for her as an artist and activist. “It shows us the collective power of people speaking up for their rights. It gives us hope. It gives us this feeling that our 50-60 years of struggle has meant something and will continue to mean something,” she said. 

“That's why we didn't give up unlike some others who dropped off in between. Young women are coming on their own now. A new generation is now also saying we will stand for our freedom, we have the right to dress the way we want to, we've the right to say that nobody should touch us if we don't want to be, that no means no.”

Nadia Victor, a working mother from Shah Faisal colony, a densely populated residential area in eastern Karachi, had brought along her young daughters Grezla, 13, and Cassandra, 9. 

“It is good for such events to take place,” she told Sapan News in Urdu. “They are highlighting things that need to be highlighted about what women undergo in this society.”

Bringing Martial Rape to Limelight

This year’s event was themed around marital rape, focusing on the case of Shanti, a 19-year old woman whose husband subjected her to brutal sexual violence on the second day of marriage in July last year. She lay hospitalised, in a coma, for a month before dying last year.

Horrifying details of Shanti’s ordeal shared at the event spoke to how women’s pain is routinely dismissed as “imaginary” or simply a normal part of being a wife and mother. Organisers laid out Shanti’s bari (trousseau) at the venue alongside a poster urging attendees to attend court hearings and pressure authorities for swift justice. They called for the society to recognise marital rape as violence “even without a woman dying.”

Two girls stood silently holding a placard that read: ‘Forcing your daughter to get married is forcing her to get raped.’ 

The message speaks to a reality across the South Asian region where the priority for most families is to get their daughters married. On a sheet where attendees were penning messages to their mothers -- words they could not say aloud -- an anonymous note read: “Would you rather see me married or alive?”

Men in general are treated as women's protectors, but a woman's husband is treated as her ultimate protector, explained an Aurat March organiser who asked not to be named. Cases like Shanti’s expose the lie about how husbands are supposed to protect their wives, who are supposed to obey him no matter what. “That is the mentality we want to challenge, because we believe that women are first and foremost human beings.”

Cases like a rape-at-gunpoint complaint that the Lahore High Court dismissed last December on the grounds that the couple were not yet divorced, support Aurat March’s demands for better reporting systems and sensitisation training for healthcare professionals and law enforcement agencies dealing with such issues.

No institution actually recognizes marital rape “the way it should be recognized,” noted the organiser. “There needs to be a concerted effort from all quarters to bring this issue first to the limelight and then work towards ending it.”

Joined by Kermani, volunteers on stage sang "Darya Ki Qasam" (I swear by the river) to harmonium music, reviving memories of the anthem's iconic 1995 performance in Lahore that carried its feminist message across generations and borders.

Aurat March has also proposed a programme they call “Aurat Haq-e-Mehnat” (Women’s Right to Labour) which proposes a monthly cash transfer by the Sindh provincial government, alongside the existing poverty relief allowance Benazir Income Support Program. The proposal aims to benefit women across backgrounds as compensation for unpaid and unacknowledged domestic labour. 

Drawing on earlier successful policy experiments in Brazil and some states of India, the demand aims to counter a patriarchal family structure where women are conditioned early to see caregiving and service to others as their primary purpose, valued only when they conform to prescribed gender roles.

Although gender-based violence is often reduced to physical or sexual harm, Aurat March also sees financial dependence and economic deprivation as variants of abuse that women face. This is exemplified in cases of women trapped in unhealthy marriages, where they are disrespected on a daily basis yet remain unable to walk out due to lack of financial independence.

Such realities are further intensified in low income, working-class communities where suffocating inflation has made it harder to make basic ends meet.

A participant from Lyari who walks on the streets selling pistachios and almonds described the crushing economic hardships women in her neighbourhood face.

“We live on whatever we bring in. There's no other way,” she told Sapan News. “Just two days ago, a man in our area took his life because there was no money. He had four daughters. Our women face the same issues.”

 

March Expands Into Other Cities

Participants displayed colourful placards about a variety of issues. Some demanded autonomy through the controversial slogan ‘Jiss Ka Jism Uski Marzi (Their body, their choice)’, while others challenged the perpetual male gaze with phrases like ‘Kis ‘Nazar’ Se Dekhte Ho (What gaze do you look with?).’ 

“Men of Quality Don’t Fear Equality,” read a hand-made placard held by a man in his twenties attending the March for the first time. He said that many people still do not believe in the event’s politics or purpose. “At least somebody from my family had to come out so awareness spreads,” he told Sapan News.

He said he did not tell his family he was going to the event. 

“It's a learning experience for me. Being rebellious in such matters just changes you somehow,” he said. “It brings motivation inside you.”

About the venomous propaganda against the March, he commented: “If you want to spread hate, at least become educated first. And if you genuinely want to make someone understand something, do it with love - because the only thing more powerful than hate is love.”

Beyond Karachi, Aurat March has expanded into chapters in smaller cities and towns around the country. In some places, like the historic city of Mirpurkhas it remains aspirational. Planned for the first time last year, it had to be canceled but organisers are planning to hold it later this year. 

Khanzadi Kapri, 28, founder of Aurat Sujag, a grassroots feminist initiative working on gender equality and climate justice in Mirpurkhas, traveled nearly four hours by road to participate in Aurat March Karachi a couple of weeks ago.

After addressing the crowd, she spoke to Sapan News about the pressures women in her area face. She said it’s a challenge to mobilise them for gatherings “because they work in the fields but rarely come out onto the streets in this way”. 

She added that they also face pressure from right-wing groups using religion as a pretext to attack women who venture out in public, terming them ‘immoral’. They even "sent elders to our homes, asking us to silence our women,” she said. 

Women across the region face similar issues, she added, from child labour and early marriages to domestic violence and the impacts of climate change.

Process to Bring Societal Changes 

At one corner of the venue, the respected architect and urban planner Arif Hasan, 83, sat quietly in his wheelchair, listening to the speeches, having braved the uneven ground with his attendant to reach that point. A steady stream of friends, colleagues, and fans stopped by to greet him and sometimes take selfies. 

Hasan has attended every Aurat March in Karachi, driven, he said, by his interest in "society, principles, and resistance”.

“Things have changed. People are angry with state repression. Many come out because they wish to express their concerns and anger, and that's why participation has increased,” he observed. “Such protests and rallies did not happen very often before. It is not only Aurat March’s participation that increases, but also all forms of opposition.”

Digital rights activist Farieha Aziz briefly addressed the crowd towards the end, speaking about how the Pakistan Electronic Crimes Act law, introduced in 2016 with a protectionist and paternalistic framing, has in practice seen its “protection” mechanisms used disproportionately against women.

“When women posted online about harassment, abuse, and assault, cases were brought against them. This is a system of silencing through law and lawfare," she said. 

“You saw it with the NOC - how it's codified to stop you, to decide whom to extend solidarity with and with whom not, what to say or not. The state wants to save itself from you. It is important to know about the law, how it's being used, and collectively demand its repeal.”

As the sun set, participants marched towards the urban beach known as Sea View, stopping to rest along the way, some sitting directly on the roadside, reclaiming public streets, as organisers put it. 

Male and female volunteers formed human chains on either side of the procession with their arms linked, stretching far behind the marchers to shield them from traffic, while women police officers walked ahead of the procession. Police personnel kept miscreants at bay as volunteers incorporated new participants into the March in a coordinated flow.

The event ended with the crowd clapping along to a performance by pioneering rapper Urooj Fatima, popularly known as Sindhi Chhokri. 

WATCH VIDEO:: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DYMZbnLI1eC/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==

An Urdu-translated version of the Chilean Feminist Anthem against \rape performed by women volunteers closed off the event – an event that is part of an ongoing process bringing about quiet changes in Pakistan and perhaps across the region.

“Aurat March is about women’s identity and it's very important because the biggest change that has come in Pakistan is about women,” as Arif Hasan put it. 

“This expression will keep increasing, and their involvement and spaces of resistance will keep growing. Nobody can stop it”.

(The writer is a journalist intern with Sapan News based in Karachi, passionate about covering women-centric stories at the intersection of peace, human rights, and politics. On X @AbdullahZahid. By special arrangement with Sapan)