Marchers holding placards during Aurat March 2020. (Nawab Afridi, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

It is Friday. A local mosque in Pakistan blares the customary weekly sermon for the hundreds of men who have driven, cycled and walked to the mosque to attend Friday prayers and for their mothers, wives, sisters and daughters praying at home to hear. This Friday follows the script of every other Friday in Pakistan.

Today, however, there is a difference: instead of preaching about the rights of parents, the importance of giving alms, or stories from the life of the Prophet Muhammad, the maulvi (preacher) warns the hushed crowd against what he calls the ‘anti-Islamic, Western propaganda’ that is Aurat March. In doing so, he reveals the growing power of a movement that has reimagined what ‘progress’ looks like for Pakistani womxn (a category that includes cisgender women as well as transgender and non-binary individuals affected by patriarchal structures) by fostering connections with groups that have been increasingly pushed to the margins of society.

Dangerous rhetoric

In his sermon, the maulvi passionately laments the societal degradation this movement will cause through promoting un-Islamic practices that lead the young astray. He oscillates between the much feared ‘West’ and the equally hated India when trying to determine the sponsors of this vulgarity in the land of the pure.

The maulvi contains himself enough to not call any of the participants of the March whores (although he does not shy away from implying it ever so delicately). While vitriolic, his rhetoric is more benign than what has been said about Aurat March in the past. He does not, for example, accuse the participants of the movement of blasphemy as happened to the Aurat March chapter in the capital of Islamabad in 2021. Vituperation can be borne with a thick skin, but blasphemy allegations carry the possibility of a mob lynching.

Pushing beyond ‘women’s empowerment’

The source of the preacher’s chagrin, the Aurat March (which translates to Women’s March), began in Karachi, Pakistan, in 2018 and quickly spread to almost all major cities in the country. Now held annually, the movement is divided into three main ‘chapters’ within the three largest cities in the country: Aurat March Karachi, Aurat March Lahore, and Aurat Azaadi March (Women Freedom March) Islamabad. While the chapters have their own manifestos and organisational structures, they are united in their feminist ideological framework rooted in indigenous realities.

Artist Shehzil Malik created this poster for Aurat March 2022. (Photo: Shehzil Malik under Creative Commons)

Since 2018, Pakistani womxn and allies have poured onto the streets on International Women’s Day (March 8), their numbers steadily multiplying, to protest pidar shahi (patriarchy) in all its manifestations. The marchers routinely pay homage to feminist icons of the past such as human rights lawyer Asma Jehangir and the Urdu writer Kishwar Naheed.

Nonetheless, Aurat March is in no way a simple derivation of women's movements of the past. On the contrary, it is a collective that strives for the emancipation of womxn rather than the older idea of ‘women’s empowerment.’ A radical, intersectional, left-leaning feminist organisation, the Aurat March of today was birthed in a society wrapped in the nexus of transnational capitalism, the Global War on Terror, state-sponsored violence and cultural misogyny.

History of women’s rights movements in Pakistan

“Aurat March is a movement mobilising against structures of oppression and demanding emancipation. It is marked by a consciousness of global politics, but the focus of its activism remains locally rooted. It understands that in an increasingly interconnected world, the policies and practices of the imperial core will manifest themselves in the periphery. ”

After the Partition in 1947, wealthy women mobilised to work alongside the newly formed state to aid the millions of Pakistanis in crippling poverty. One of the oldest running groups of this orientation is APWA (All Pakistan Women’s Association), a non-profit established in 1949 by Begum Rana’a Liaqat Ali, the wife of the first Prime Minister of Pakistan.

Organisations like APWA functioned more like charities than activist groups in the sense that they provided education and basic healthcare to the Muslim refugees that had arrived from India after the Partition, created workshops for women from low income households to learn skills they could monetize and, at times, worked with the the nascent government to enact legislative change to protect the rights of women. Their focus was to improve the position of women within, and through, the existing structures rather than fundamentally challenge them. In other words, they set out to empower women.

The price of NGO-ification

The decade following the Partition set the framework for the monetization and de-politicization of women’s ‘empowerment’ movements in Pakistan. As ideas of ‘saving’ third world women were becoming increasingly sponsored by kind-hearted Western individuals and organisations on a civilising mission, NGOs (non-governmental organisations) run by wealthy Pakistani women began to mushroom, bringing the mission of their American/European donors to Pakistan.

It is estimated that by the 1990s, there were around 25,000 to 35,000 NGOs in the country with the mission of ‘women’s empowerment’. These organisations were no different from APWA in the sense that they functioned as apolitical aid groups running dastarkhwan (food banks), providing legal assistance, as well as finding minor employment opportunities for low-skilled women workers.

The NGO-ification of women’s movements meant that structural issues were not addressed, gender-minorities were largely ignored, and the class divide was deepened between the rich urbanites and the majority of the low-income, rural women they were supposed to be serving. Apart from the years 1980-1988, when the Women Action Forum (WAF) was created in response to the Hudood Ordinance brought by the despotic dictatorship of General Zia-ul-Haq, there was no real large-scale uprising against the state by women's groups in Pakistan to demand their own rights rather than focusing their energies on a collective cause.

All that changed, however, when the Aurat March movement began almost thirty years later.

The Aurat March: From empowerment to emancipation

The 2022 manifesto for the Aurat March Karachi chapter is a call for privileged women and the wider society to recognize womxn’s labour. “This year we march for our labour,” it aptly opens. “This year we march for the burden placed on us and our bodies…We march for a living wage. We march for social security. We march for our right to rest and leisure.”

Unlike groups such as APWA, its goals are not for women to be empowered within the existing system. Instead, the movement explicitly rejects the system as being governed by capitalist and patriarchal exploitation that have continuously appropriated and exploited womxn’s labour.

Participants in one of the early Aurat March mobilizations in Pakistan. (Photo: Amnesty International)

Aurat March is a movement mobilising against structures of oppression and demanding emancipation. It is marked by a consciousness of global politics, but the focus of its activism remains locally rooted. It understands that in an increasingly interconnected world, the policies and practices of the imperial core will manifest themselves in the periphery.

In the context of globalization and transnational capitalist exploitation, for example, Aurat March has expanded the scope of feminist activism to include protesting the IMF-mandated austerity measures that have cut funding to public services in Pakistan, continuous American support of the Israeli genocide against Palestinians, as well as the Pakistani state using imported surveillance technologies against its own citizens.

Furthermore, Aurat March chapters have worked towards intersectional politics to mend divisions based on class, religion, gender identity and ability. The movement is dominated by left-leaning politics with ideas of class privilege in mind. According to UN Pakistan, 67 percent of women work in the agriculture sector, 70 percent work vulnerable jobs, and over 90 percent of women have experienced workplace harassment. Aurat March has brought class solidarity to mainstream feminist politics in Pakistan, centring labour unions such as Lady Health Workers union and lending their energy and body to the fight for the rights of agricultural, domestic and factory workers.

It also allies itself with Minority Rights March (a group to protect the rights of religious minorities), Sindh Moorat March (for the protection of trans/khwaja sira individuals) and Baloch Yekjehti Committee (for the rights of the Baloch people, an ethnic minority, against economic exploitation and state enforced abductions of Baloch men).

The Aurat March’s expressions of solidarity, and the deliberate centering of womxn who are left most vulnerable in the current system, has led to a radical reimagining of what third world feminist politics can look like and what it can, and should, lead to: emancipation.