Showing up

THERE is a photograph from this paper that was going around a few days ago. In it, classical dancer Sheema Kermani, who has spent decades using her art as an act of resistance, is being pulled from a car by policewomen. She is dressed in a sari. She is graceful in the way that some people simply cannot stop being, even when the state is manhandling them on a Karachi street.

A startling number of people looked at that image on social media and the thing that troubled them — the thing that needed explaining, debating, defending — was the bindi on her forehead.

I do not blame those who describe this country absurd. Nothing unsettles its loudest voices quite like a woman living on her own terms. A woman who has not asked for permission. And nothing crystallises that anxiety more than Aurat March, an annual gathering that has managed to provoke a level of outrage entirely disproportionate to what it actually is. Women. In a public space. With signs.

What terrifies the opposition to Aurat March is not disorder. It is the opposite. It is women who are perfectly clear about what they want. Autonomy over their own lives. Autonomy over their own bodies. The right to exist in public without negotiating the terms of that existence with someone else. That is the demand. And for a certain kind of Pakistani, there is no demand more threatening than that one.

Misogyny is not just a disease of the uneducated.

But here is what disappointed me most. In a country capable of such absurdity, the debate that followed Kermani’s arrest did not centre on the image of an older woman being manhandled on a Karachi street. It did not question what kind of state drags an older woman out of a car to prevent her from speaking. It asked why she was wearing a bindi. Whether she was Hindu. Whether that made her less deserving of basic dignity. And then came the whataboutery. The reliable chorus that arrives every time women dare to occupy space.

To the many seemingly educated Pakistanis — profiles full of life in London, Toronto, New York — I genuinely want to know what about the bindi offended you the most? Was it the fear that a Pakistani woman had borrowed something from across the border? Or was it simply that she had made a choice about her own body and her own appearance without consulting the gallery? Because I notice these same voices had very little to say about the hands on her arms.

Pakistan is not without its moments of progress. It elected a woman prime minister twice before most countries were even having that conversation. It has passed harassment laws. Domestic violence legislation. Frameworks that on paper suggest a country capable of protecting its women.

And yet.

Women who come forward to name their abusers are shamed into silence. The laws exist but the implementation does not. The progress gets absorbed — by institutions, by social pressure, by the slow grind of a culture that knows how to wait out a moment. That is the pattern. Not dramatic reversal. Not a single villain. Just a quiet, patient resistance to actually changing. Progress as performance. Reform as paperwork. And women left to navigate the gap between what the law says and what their lives look like.

Women activists have spent their lives refusing to navigate that gap quietly. And they are arrested for it.

But let us talk about the educated. The ones with degrees on their walls and opinions on their timelines. The men who will argue passionately about democracy, about press freedom, about the rule of law — and in the same breath question why a woman was wearing a sari or where Aurat March gets its funding from.

And then there are the women. Because misogyny’s most effective weapon has always been the women it recruits to police other women. The ones who ask why she was dressed like that. Why she was out at that hour. Why she feels the need to march. Why she cannot just be grateful for how far things have come.

How far things have come? An elderly woman was dragged from a car for trying to hold a press conference. That is how far things have come.

I have come to believe that misogyny is not just a disease of the uneducated, the easily dismissed. It runs through drawing rooms and dinner parties and university common rooms. It wears good shoes. It has a passport full of stamps. It knows better and chooses this anyway. That is the version that frightens me most. Not the ignorance. The choice.

The women activists were released. The march happened anyway. Kermani showed up, with bindi, on her own terms — the way she always has. The state did not get that from her. I doubt it ever will.

The writer is a former journalism instructor.

X: @LedeingLady

Published in Dawn, May 17th, 2026

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