KARACHI: “The Aurat March is the need of the hour because it is a voice against extremism. Many years ago, the Women Action Forum was formed like this, to speak against the injustices. It showed the men in power back then that you cannot trample over women,” said senior journalist and columnist Zubeida Mustafa.

She was delivering the keynote speech on day one of the two-day 3rd Women Conference, which opened at the Arts Council of Pakistan, Karachi, on Thursday.

“Talking about things and even making noise creates awareness. When women are not aware of their rights and tolerate all wrongs, they need to be made aware,” she said.

“Here a research that showed that 44 per cent women think that it is alright for men to beat them. These women don’t even know about the Aurat March or other movements like it. How are we to develop their thinking? How can they be educated? And these women also bear children and rear children. What kind of minds will they help develop?” she pondered.

Two-day 3rd Women Conference opens at Arts Council

Poet Fatima Hasan read her poem about women and what they were really capable of doing and what heights they could reach.

Mahnaz Rahman, director of Aurat Foundation, said that no society could move forward while ignoring its women.

Former caretaker provincial minister of Sindh and rights activist Anis Haroon said that when you held back half of your population, you also stayed back.

Writer and poet Noorul Huda Shah spoke about the real picture behind the facade of girls receiving education and women working in offices in big cities.

“There are also women working in fields under the harsh sun, there are also women working in brick kilns, their hands full of sores. Due to abject poverty they are even selling one kidney for some extra money if their husband tells them to do so,” she shared some horrifying realities.

Karo-kari

She said that the terrible practice of karo-kari was no longer restricted to villages.

“In cities, there are incidents in which brothers have killed their sisters and fathers killed their newborn daughters. These ills happen when the state doesn’t take ownership of its people and doesn’t look into why all this is happening. We are not taught humanity in our educational institutions,” she said.

Educationist Sadiqa Salahuddin said that she found girl students and female teachers full of ambitions. “They dream about their future. But then they compromise. I wish their families would tell them not to let anything come in the way of their dreams and ambitions,” she added.

Senior journalist Ghazi Salahuddin said that women’s emancipation was an idea whose time had come.

Human rights activist Karamat Ali said that instead of scattered efforts there was a need for one consolidated effort by women to raise their voice such as the Aurat March. “That way it will carry a bigger impact,” he added.

The president of Hum Network, Sultana Siddiqui, said that mindsets needed to be changed and complexes needed to do away with for society to prosper. “I am a single mother who worked hard and brought up three sons, who are very proud of their better halves and happy that the wives are more famous than them. This kind of mindset is needed here,” she said.

In his welcome address, earlier, the president of the Arts Council said that he saw so many success stories before him on the stage, but they were individual stories. The collective narrative regarding women in Pakistan is that they need to be equal citizens for which they need equal opportunities.

“Without it there is no success story for the majority of women in our country,” he said.

Published in Dawn, March 11th, 2022