I was incarcerated for attending Aurat March on International Women’s Day

Aleah F

Of pitting a burgeoning feminist movement against a society resistant to change: the tale of “Aurat March” and the feminist struggle in Pakistan.
Aurat March, Pakistan’s counterpart to Women’s March, takes place each year on International Women’s Day in the country’s most prominent cities, such as Islamabad, Lahore, and Karachi. It is an annual feminist socio-political demonstration in Pakistan that calls for the complete emancipation of all women living in Pakistan facing injustices and oppression in every form they manifest. Aurat March has been controversial since its very inception in 2018, and many hold it akin to a Thucydides Trap that intends to trample over the carefully orchestrated ‘benign’ hegemon of patriarchy. Infamous for its confrontational stances on male chauvinism and the deep-rooted sexism pervading Pakistani culture, it has forced people to break the pervasive silence on hitherto unspoken matters such as marital rape, forced conversions, paedophilia, fundamentalism, and domestic violence.
Pakistan is incredibly hostile towards women and gender minorities, and the general populace, whose morality and self-identity stems from radical interpretations of religion, is not susceptible to any different voice in the discussion about women and gender minority rights. Thus the clergy and conservatives, weary of being challenged by the mounting tide of young feminists, meet every question to the gendered order with instinctive resistance.
As the days pass with quick succession, and March 8 draws nearer, Pakistani social media brims with the buzz of bigots taunting feminists and renowned women’s rights activists. The pictures of placards and unconventional slogans exchanged on twitter quickly become a hot topic. Men, infuriated by the insouciant mockery of traditional socio-religious roles, and women, taking offence at the sanctity of ‘womanhood’ being derided as ‘oppressive’, lead to Aurat March accomplishing the feat of being equally loathed by men and women alike, which is nothing short of impressive.
This year would have been my first participation in Aurat March. After weeks of trying to convince my mother to let me attend the demonstration, she agreed. It was an hour long drive from my house to the location the march was going to be held in and because my mother had to run a few errands before she dropped me off at the march, we left home early. By the time we reached the place, it was almost 2:00 pm and I was worried I might be too late since the starting time of the march was 1:00 pm, and there were no protesters in sight. I got out of the car, and as I was walking I caught a glimpse of a group of women staring at me. I decided to approach them and before I could go past greetings, they brought up that they were there for the Aurat March and asked me whether I was a protester as well. I told them I was. They continued talking, and tried to engage me in conversation, but I sensed something was amiss. Normally people would bring banners and posters with them to the march, but none of the six women surrounding me had a single poster. I slowly turned around to retreat back towards my car when I noticed from the corner of my eyes that the women began trailing behind me. The moment one of them grabbed me I called out to my mother in panic, but by then it was too late. I could feel her digging her fingernails into my flesh, and clawing my arms as she pulled me towards the police van – it was extremely painful. I knew not to resist, so I went along calmly in an attempt to placate her. Inside were five women. One was a senior citizen, one was a middle aged woman, two were young adults, and one seemed as old as me. They all looked tense and anxious. I got in before my mother and could hear her screaming. She kept apologising profusely to the cops, saying that she had no criminal intentions and that she was only here because of the march, and nothing else. She had been sitting inside the car, and the women, who turned out to be undercover cops, had forced her door open and hauled her out of her car, which was unlocked with the windows rolled down. She begged them to let her lock her car at least, but they wouldn’t listen to her. They took her car keys, rummaged through the front pockets, and took her phone and my digital camera into their possession. When she was brought inside the police van she was visibly distressed and the woman sitting beside her patted her back and tried consoling her. A female cop came inside, and asked whether any of us had a phone, and if we “knew what was better for us”, we should do exactly as they say. She realised none of us had a phone, so after lingering for a while she left. Sometime later, two more women came inside; one was very visibly pregnant. One after the other, we introduced ourselves and began talking to understand what was going on. The elderly woman introduced herself as a senior feminist activist and a member of Women’s Action Forum (WAF), a women rights collective that had been involved in feminist work for many decades. She gave us a breakdown of the whole situation and what we can expect from the authorities if we were interrogated. Two people began sobbing. A woman, who told us she was 21, said that she had arrived at 12:15 pm, way before the march was scheduled, and she had been all alone. The cops surrounded her, pulled her hair and charged at her with batons. There was a young student from Progressive Students Federation’s Islamabad-Rawalpindi chapter who said the police pulled her clothes and dragged her all the way to the prisoner van. When she resisted, she also got beaten with batons. The rest said that they were given no chance to react and their brains froze before they could do anything.
Suddenly the van began moving. It took a few quick turns and then drove straight ahead. It stopped for a minute and we stood up from the seat to check from the little barred window for any hint at where we could be. The first time we saw nothing; the next time the van stopped, we saw a church in what seemed like a barren plot of land. The next time we were at our destination: G-7 Women’s Prison.
The police told us to follow them, and led us inside a dimly lit corridor. On the left side were two lock up rooms where all the protesters had been detained among Afghan refugees and beggars. We stopped at the second one and the protesters inside began yelling: “Do not come inside no matter what. Leave immediately!” but the police had already locked the door from the outside. The Senior House Officer entered the room shortly after and shouted at her colleagues to body-search us. If anyone resisted, their clothes were to be torn off, and they would be paraded outside completely naked. My mother tried to get her to calm down, but she shouted at her to shut up, so my mother went silent. We were cornered and made to stand with our backs to the wall and had to go through a full body search. I was the first one to complete the search, and was made to stand in front of the detention room. A protester, who I later learned was named Shabana, asked how old I was, and I told her I was 16. The girl next to me said she was 17. Shabana got extremely furious and shouted at the police that she won’t allow minors to enter the detention room under any circumstance. After we all completed the body searches one of the policewomen opened the door to throw us inside but the organisers and volunteers formed a human wall to prevent us from entering. The cops managed to break them apart and closed the door after pushing us inside. The cell I was locked in had a horrible stench. It was a small room with around 40 people at the time I arrived, and a doorless bathroom that had no running water and no soap. Just outside the bathroom was a dustbin overflowing with garbage. You could hear the buzz of flies and insects as they whirred their tiny wings and flitted through the cell, circling the dustbin and the entrance of the bathroom.
We confronted the police about their abusive behaviour with us thus far, and they began hurling insults at us. They taunted us and joked around; “Is this the freedom you always marched for, the freedom to stay in prisons? We will show you what true freedom feels like.” In response all the protesters stood up and chanted slogans at the top of our voices. We sang revolutionary songs, recited the poems of Faiz Ahmad Faiz, a prominent leftist poet of the post-partition era, and resisted despite the circumstances. It helped us stay in high spirits. We talked about the political landscape of Pakistan with regard to human rights and freedom of speech, what it means to live under a brutal theocracy as progressive minded people, and what would be the future of resistance. Detention for protesting was a tough situation to find yourself in, but our fellow detainees made the experience way more tolerable. We listened to one another, offered comfort, reassured each other that everything would be alright, and reminded one another not to worry. The support made the experience far easier to digest.
With the organisers was a lawyer. She told us she came to the prison as the legal representative of her client Ms Tahira Abdullah, who is a very prominent human rights activist, but the police imprisoned her as well despite seeing her lawyer card and CNIC. There were many people imprisoned that never went to the march. They were the family members of imprisoned protesters and organisers that wanted to see whether their loved ones were alright, but ended up getting swept up in the mess.
It wasn’t long after we were thrown in the cell that the media began arriving. A journalist entered the corridor we were inside and the protesters sighed in relief. The journalist’s phone rang and when she answered her phone the SHO screamed why she had a phone on her. They pinned her arms, and tugged at her hair before dragging her out. We all were taken aback and began booing the police in frustration. They kept bringing more and more people into the cell, and soon there were around 80 protesters, Afghan refugees and beggars behind bars. The way the police treated them was nothing short of dehumanising, and seeing the innocent children and toddlers crying only made the situation worse. There was not enough room for everyone to sit down, and there came a time when it was too hard to breathe, to the point of suffocation. Pregnant women and other protesters were getting nauseous and said they felt their heads spiralling. We kept banging against the metal bars to draw the attention of the police officers standing outside, but they wouldn’t come until a protester began screeching for them to intervene to get the sick pregnant woman out. She was given the permission of a short walk around the premises by our jailers, before getting thrown back into jail again.
The hours went by very slowly, and by the time night rolled in, a lot of the protesters were depleted of all energy and just patiently waited for news of what was to come next. Around 10:00 pm, an official informed us we must undertake a pledge if we wanted to be released. We protesters rose to our feet and opposed this but the Aurat March organisers told everyone to prioritise their safe return home and sign the pledge. One after another we were called outside and brought to a room where we had to sign a paper that stated that we had incited the police to act by our unruly conduct and by violating section 144, a provision that barred citizens from organizing or joining any gathering of more than four individuals, including demonstrations and protests in the city; we had committed a grave offence. I asked them why I was being made to sign this when I never did anything that was written, but received no response. It was very important to highlight that even though I went to Islamabad to attend the protest, I and no other protester broke Section 144 since we were arrested individually, and not in clusters. No protester quarrelled or attacked the police, nor did they foment others to act violently against the police at any time before, during, or after arrest. Thus, the content of this undertaking was nothing short of complete, fabricated lies.
The state’s present hostility toward the Aurat March should not be mistaken for a sudden excess of authority or an unfortunate lapse in democratic practice. It belongs, rather plainly, to a lineage of control that has shaped Pakistan’s politics for decades. When General Ziaul Haq’s brutal military regime introduced the Hudood Ordinances, which is widely regarded as one of the gravest attacks on the autonomy of women in contemporary Pakistani history, it rendered women completely vulnerable before the law and it was then, in response, that many progressive, feminist collectives such as WAF, composed of activists, poets and writers, took to the streets of Lahore in 1983 in protest. Their resistance was met with tear gas, and they were beaten with police batons. As ironic as it seems, they too were charged under Section 144. Just like us.
The present reliance on Section 144 to justify arrests and dispersals carries an unmistakable resemblance to the ways once employed under martial law. Self-expression is the absolute manifestation of human intelligence. Because we are defined by our thoughts, the ability to articulate them through language and speech is inseparable from our humanity. The right to speak one’s mind is therefore not a subsidiary freedom but the progenitor of all others, including freedom of religion, conscience and belief, and the right to political participation. Theocracies and authoritarian regimes in Pakistan have a history of punishing free-thinkers who dissent against, or voice opinions different from, the stances propagated by the state, laced with censorship or social reprisal, which later manifests itself as a halt to collective progression and a homogenous political and cultural sphere, with no diversity or varying perspectives.
There is no reason for a democratic state, such as what Pakistan deems itself to be, to curtail the rights of its citizens to assembly, as this would contradict its very system of governance. Where the dictatorship disguised its oppressive rule under the rhetoric of morality, the contemporary state prefers to utilise the more legalistic jargon, e.g. “public order”, “security”, “protocol”, etc. The ostensibly objective language used by ‘cool, considerate’ men holding key authority positions may on the surface attempt to invoke a manner of paternalistic concern, yet the sophisticated polish does little to conceal the familiar objective of silencing all forms of dissent.
It would do us good to mull over what it is that the state is so unsettled by when it comes to us marching women. If it is the refusal of quiet compliance upon which so much of the sociopolitical arrangement still depends, then in that light, our brief detention was another moment in a protracted struggle in which women insist, again and again, that if our voice makes people uncomfortable, then so be it. The fault does not lie with us, but rather the perceived need for silence when it comes to the feminist struggle.