A march during Covid is a difficult thing to plan safely. For women in Pakistan, determined to have “Aurat March” today, there are other risks – for their physical safety, as well as online abuse and fishing.
Noor is the organizer of this year’s national disguised rallies. She said she could not give her family name for fear of reprisals for her work.
“The pandemic has significantly hampered mobilization,” said Noor, who added that the closure of public transportation was a huge obstacle for women in the country. But the healthcare crisis is at the heart of Pakistan’s march this year to mark International Women’s Day.
The event is organized online as well as on the street, the organizers encouraging women to stay at home if the health risks outweigh the benefits. Those who take to the streets are required to wear political slogans on masks.
Online, women use the hashtag #PatriarchyKaPandemic (“Patriarchate Pandemic”) to mobilize women and call for daily violence against women “by airing dirty laundry,” Noor said. During the pandemic, Pakistan saw a sharp increase in domestic violence, along with an increased burden of domestic work and care for working women.
With about 600,000 Covid-19 cases in Pakistan, this year’s manifesto for the march is significantly different from previous years, due to the increased focus on health. Women call on the government to increase the health budget to 5% of GDP; implementation of a Covid-19 plan for women and minorities; combats violence against women; attributes equal recognition to women’s work; and allocate more health resources to transgender women and people.
In recent weeks, Noor has organized medical camps to talk to poorer Pakistani women about health issues in their marginalized communities, most of which are related to water and sanitation. Pakistan has one of the poorest accesses to safe water in the world, with almost 80% of the population unable to access clean drinking water.
“You realize how inaccessible and inaccessible healthcare is to many communities,” Noor said. “I may have access to health care, but they won’t.”
Muqaddas Afzal, 25, vice chairman of a group called the Lahore Progressive Students’ Collective, said the pandemic had further exposed economic and social injustices. “He also taught us that the patriarchate pandemic is much more serious than the Covid pandemic. Covid will be eradicated, but how about patriarchy? ”
“It’s a very timely topic,” said digital rights activist Nighat Dad. “In the pandemic, women’s health problems came first. I would call it a health emergency, to be honest. ”
This is evident in the country’s maternal mortality statistics: 140 maternal deaths per 100,000 births. Almost half of Pakistani mothers face malnutrition and almost 40% of children under five are affected.
Women are also calling for a fairer launch of the Covid-19 vaccine in Pakistan, one of the few countries that has allowed private companies to import vaccines without price restrictions, exacerbating social inequalities.
The pandemic “revealed many myths” about politics, said Zainab Najeeb, 28, who teaches gender and feminism at Lahore University of Management Sciences. Najeeb said women have experienced a significant increase in home care work, exacerbated by the rise in domestic violence.
An organizer of the march in Islamabad, Tooba Syed, said: “The fight against patriarchy is a fight to recognize the work of care and the role of women in social reproduction.”
In the early days of the virus, health workers who took part in mass door-to-door awareness campaigns about Covid-19 faced hostility and violence. “As domestic violence increased during the pandemic, women in health care were the only form of care available to survivors of domestic violence,” Syed said. “I am the backbone of the country’s public health system.”
Organizers are also calling for universal access to contraception and safe family planning, Noor said. “Our health care system does not believe that women can make their own decisions. This is our cultural mentality – there are so many obstacles and limitations in women’s decision-making. We must march and we must continue to work on this movement.
“When we march, we see a lot of women on the streets. It is liberating and gives you a lot of hope. See how many women are together in this and see hope for change. ”