Daily Times

The ever-broached concept of feminism took a new turn with the onset of Aurat March in Pakistan, which gained the contentious status ever since it made the first piece of news in 2018. The collective of ‘Hum Auratien’, Aurat March refers to a well-thought-out and peaceful protests across the country whose cardinal motif was centered around the emancipation of women from the shackles of the unwanted patriarchal set up of the country and to get their basic rights. ‘Aurat March’, every year, is planned on the occasion of International Women’s Day. The notion gained the roaring applause from the women worldwide, but at the same time was spurned from fundamentalists in the same sphere.

The first “Aurat March” took place in 2018, and got everyone’s tongues wagging about the slogans and posters represented in the rally. Criticizing it as the espousal of “Western Ideas”, the fundamentalists propounded the notion to have a negative influence on the people. The unreceptive behavior from this section of the country was considered as the obvious attempt to suppress the roaring voice of the women of the country, which in return made them more voiced about their stance.

As the year 2020 has seen cockcrow, and with Aurat March being just around the corner, the concept has dawned with new controversies than ever before. From celebrities to socialists to media persons, everyone has some slanting views about this year’s march. With the august of the country being equal entrants, the rally became the cause celebre among many other issues at hand, but is it worth raising our voices?

Pakistan is among those countries where around 93% of women face physical or sexual violence in public places and 20-30% of women face domestic abuse during their lifetime. Along with these calamities, marital rape has further aggravated the situation for women, who do not feel safe even with their partners, in their own homes. The glaring case of Qandeel Baloch’s honor killing is no less exception in this regard. This demands an exigency for the movements that could enlighten the hidebound of the society while supporting the women who are trying to establish their own identities in this male-centric set-up. The women participating in Aurat March step forward with the simple grounds of making this society safe for women and to eliminate every threat they receive only because of being a woman.

The reception that the march received flooded the social, print and digital media. People, with varying opinions, exhibited the different frames of mind nourishing in our society. Mostly negative, the criticism evinces the need of educating the plebeians about the exact meaning of Aurat March.

For starters, one should be flexible about the idea that the connotation is not an evil threat to the patriarch of the country, but to address the basic inequalities in the society. Whether it involves women to dress up according to their own choice, following their careers, making their livings -leading the life of their own choice- the impetus revolves around the fact that women need to explore more characters than the already assumed character of the “Other”.

Some famous posters/slogans from the 2018 march were highly criticized and were taken in a completely different way to change the exact meaning behind those slogans. The most famous of them was the “Khana khud garam kar lo” which gained the backlash from the dyed-in-the-wool fanatics, resulting in the inundation of memes on social media targeting the very simple slogan and making it the source of a laugh for people around. The controversies arise due to the soi-disant religious authorities dragging religion into the innocent concept of the march.

This year’s Aurat March took a dramatic turn when the lionized of the country started pouring in their responses, initiating the online battle on social media between their followers. The ruthless bashing of one of the most celebrated writers of the country, Khalil-ur-Rehman Qamar, on the fellow female guest in a live show, swamped the social media for many days which started to resemble a demesne of battalions. This fumed the women across the country, who related it with the everyday scenario of women in Pakistan, dividing the audience into two moieties. The raison d’etre of Aurat March becomes clear when mansplaining like this was projected on national television.

Aurat March can be taken as one of the many planes flying over the vast sky of feminism, trying to reach its destination securely. Instead of considering it as a threat to masculinity, some hype to get fifteen minutes of fame, this march should be taken as one of the fecund ways for women to raise voices for the injustice they have been subjected to for so long.

The writer can be reached at vardah.gill@gmail.com