Every year, the organisers of the Aurat March hold a press conference to discuss, at length, the focus of that year’s manifesto. This year's topic was women’s health, inspired partly by the new British law to abolish the tax on tampons and sanitary pads, contrary to the EU’s policy of taxing them as luxury goods rather than essentials. The British government is working towards making sanitary products more affordable and accessible to women. Issues like maternal mortality rates, a lack of access to screenings for breast and cervical cancer and the inability of victims of sexual abuse to seek justice were also discussed. But on the air waves, as has become a yearly routine, one would only see provocative, often satirical, placards and young women from English-medium schools and colleges chanting Western feminist slogans.

Of course, the memes of placards that go the most viral are the ones that are the most provocative; the most fringe. By the time the message reaches the echo chambers of social media, it is a caricature of a caricature, distorted first through the fun house mirror for ratings that is the TV reporter’s lens and then through the funhouse mirror for likes and followers that is the political discourse on Twitter.

Here too, as in many other parts of the world where existing cultural polarisation has been further intensified by toxic political spaces on social media, right-wing extremists are seeking to shut down the entire movement, because they are outraged by the slogans of a very loud but minority faction of the movement, or because they have misunderstood the narrative, at least in part due to the media’s fun-house mirror framing of it.

A criticism of the Aurat March from the left is often that it represents a minority and, perhaps in appearance, elite segment of society. But every year, the march is joined by countless working women’s groups and labour unions. At any of the Aurat Marches in the past few years, you could find a group of steel-mill workers demanding equal wages for women marching next to a gaggle of college students holding up neon signs that read “Stop using PMS as a slur”. The diversity of this movement would be lost to someone who only watched the march on television or heard about it on social media. There is music, art and poetry at these marches. Survivors of sexual assault come forward to tell their stories and feel comforted that there are others who share their trauma. It brings together women of different ages, professions and socioeconomic backgrounds. And yet, on television it looks like a pagan drum circle led by young women hungry for attention.

This year, the Aurat March organisers have taken particular notice of the media’s biased coverage of their platform. They have released statements that accuse the media of either tacitly supporting or unwittingly aiding the propaganda against them. The media, globally, has a bias for ratings more than anything else. Calm, academic discussions debating solutions to societal problems do not fetch as many views as two extreme voices yelling hysterically, if rather incoherently, at each other.

Organisers of the Aurat March say that ignorance plays a key role in the media’s corrosive framing of the narrative. Both anchors and reporters on the ground do not do their research into the issues being raised at the march. They say that the first Aurat March, in 2018, was not joined by a lot of people and therefore did not attract that much attention. In 2019, the crowd at the march was much larger and the backlash started before they even got a chance to celebrate their success. Since then, it was obvious to them that the media would not be an ally. Even though most of the placards were making demands that most people would agree with, like income and wage equality, fighting domestic violence and ending child marriages, the ones that get photographed are the ones that make a mockery of the movement. The audience needs to understand that the way they see this large, organic and diverse movement is stilted; but they do not know that what they’re getting from the nightly news is just a sliver of the complete picture.

Aurat March organisers say that the reporters that cover the marches focus on the most “sensational and attention-grabbing” placards. The very real issues concerning women and society in general tend to be ignored. Placards demanding the enforcement and establishment of a minimum wage, social security and more inclusivity for all people rarely make it on television. This trend, according to the representatives of the Aurat March, has only grown since 2019.

The Aurat March puts out a well-researched manifesto every year. The march is the culmination of an entire year's work, but none of it feeds the spectacle. The 2021 manifesto included issues surrounding transgender people, working women and mothers. The organisers were careful about making it as inclusive as possible. Unfortunately, they say that none of the reporters that covered the event were informed about any of these issues, rather they asked the same inane and biased questions over and over again. The most commonly asked were: “Isn’t this march immoral? Doesn’t our society afford women respect and decency? And isn’t this really just a ‘mummy-daddy’ crowd?”

“They ask incendiary questions and put words in our mouth,” says a representative of the Aurat March who handles media communications. “They ask questions that are sometimes insensitive and personal. There is a clear lack of gender sensitivity training and the editorial guidance to cover a wide variety of perspectives. They pointedly ridicule the march and everything it stands for by focusing on a small subset of this diverse movement. All the backlash we’re facing now is a monster created by this inaccurate coverage.”

“The male gaze of the camera zooms in and pans over our bodies, as we protest the sexual objectification of women in our society. And these are the pictures and videos that are then used in the talk shows that discuss the Aurat March, which then go viral on social media,” a representative said. Based on the coverage she has seen, she believes that “Shahzeb Khanzada is the only person in the media who reads [their] manifesto.”

The ethos of the Aurat March leans towards intersectional feminism. They believe that one cannot discuss women’s issues in a vacuum, and so the issues are framed in the larger societal contexts of poverty, a lack of education and the inability of many to seek justice. This year, the need for accessible health-care for differently-abled persons was also highlighted. In the conflation of this large and diverse movement (the Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad chapters support each other but operate autonomously), it is lost to the public that the Aurat March (which operates in Karachi and Lahore) is a separate entity from the Aurat Azadi March (which operates in Islamabad).

The key difference is that the Islamabad march tends to be more political and involves left-wing political parties such as the Women’s Democratic Front, whose flag was misrepresented by a talk show host as the national flag of France. This misrepresentation greatly added to the outrage against the movement. The Islamabad chapter is facing the brunt of this backlash. Organisers of the Aurat Azadi March say that they were warned “not to make the march political.” One of the organisers said, “We highlighted the issue of missing persons this year because we also want to give a voice to the mothers whose sons have been victims of enforced disappearance. If the entire nation is subjugated, you cannot liberate women. We do not and cannot separate the existential question of women from the existential question of the nation. The patriarchy strengthens the hierarchical structures of the status quo.” She believes that the “media has become more radicalised over the past few years.”

The same patriarchal power structure that oppresses and subjugates women, minorities and working class people uses the anti-elite sentiment of the society, which suffers from extreme income inequalities, against the very movement that seeks to uplift its most downtrodden communities. The retaliatory battle cry of this patriarchal power structure is heard from the media, the political class, public figures and religious leaders. Certain TV channels are openly defaming women who play key roles in this movement and building blasphemy cases against them in the court of public opinion. Organisers of the Aurat Azadi March, Islamabad, say that PEMRA needs to play a role in stopping this defamation that is endangering so many women. All of the sources that I spoke to for this article commented under the condition of anonymity because they are, rightly, afraid of their names ending up in the media ecosystem, if they haven’t already.

Feminist movements and LGBTQ movements often support each other since they share a common enemy: the system that sustains the superiority of the straight man (also known as the patriarchy). If the Aurat March did not support the rights of gay and trans people, it would render itself non-inclusive and ideologically inconsistent. One of the charges against some notable figures from the Aurat Marches is that they promote homosexuality. At the same time, they are being told that they should not speak of child abuse, which is rampant in madrassahs and public schools across the country, the implication being that acknowledging the existence of LGBTQ minorities in Pakistan is a sin worse than paedophillia.

Just as the organisers of the Aurat Azadi March and the hundreds of thousands of people who have joined the movement since its inception, either by joining in person or being an ally on Twitter and Instagram, are not willing to back down and be silenced, the religious right seems determined to shut them down in one way or another. Several cases of blasphemy have been registered by organisations, such as the Mumtaz Qadri Foundation (an anti-blasphemy league comprising around 400 lawyers) against women affiliated with the movement.

It is no secret that levelling a blasphemy charge against someone is basically the same as giving them a death sentence. Governor Salman Taseer was assassinated after an organised movement by factions of the religious right against him, in 2011, for publicly speaking out about the injustice of the Asia Bibi case. In Pakistan, all of the people who have been killed under suspicion of blasphemy have either been assassinated or subject to mob violence. No death sentence, in the history of Pakistan, has ever been carried out in a case related to blasphemy, under orders of a court. The simple reason for this is that these cases are notoriously difficult to prove. Most of the people killed for blasphemy have been killed extrajudicially or as a consequence of vigilantism. So, accuse them of blasphemy and scare them into silence.

The ways in which a narrative is distorted, when it is indeed distorted to serve the purposes of its opposition, reveals the prism through which the other side views that narrative. Shahzeb Khanzada, in his show on the topic said that “religion is being used” in this movement against Aurat March. If you pay attention you can see the cycles of abuse that so often become generational in this country. A 9-year-old girl who was abused by the man her parents had entrusted with her religious education was silenced at the time of the incident. And now, finally brave enough to speak her truth regardless of the consequences, she is once again being silenced by people who seem to think that what was done to her as a child is not the real crime, but talking about it is. There is a re-traumatising that takes place when a survivor of sexual assault, finally ready to speak about what happened to him or her, is met with shame rather than empathy. This willingness to go after survivors of sexual assault on social media and sometimes even in real life reflects the acceptability of abuse in our society and the ways in which it is cyclical.

As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said of the trauma she suffered after the riots at the US capitol when Congress was certifying the result of the 2020 presidential election, silencing the victims of abuse is the tactic of an abuser. The tactics used in the case of the purposefully malevolent propaganda against the women’s movement as a whole in Pakistan, particularly this year, are tactics meant to uphold the codes of silence around sexual assault, paedophilia, child abuse and the issues of women and LGBTQ people. And let's be honest, these codes of silence are not really meant to protect our morality as a society, as the fear-mongers would have you believe, they are meant to protect the abusers.

The writer is a staff member. She can be found on instagram @amar.alam_literally