Socialist-feminist groups launched the Aurat Azadi March in Islamabad on the same day as the inaugural Aurat March.
Alongside the Aurat March demonstrations in Karachi and Lahore, a related but distinct mobilization — the Aurat Azadi March ('Women's Freedom March') — was launched in Islamabad on March 8, 2018. Organized primarily by socialist-feminist and left-labour organizations including the Women Democratic Front, the Aurat Azadi March emphasized an explicitly anti-capitalist and class-conscious feminist framework, linking gender oppression to broader structures of economic exploitation and state violence.
While closely aligned in timing and spirit with the Aurat March, the Aurat Azadi March maintained its own distinct organizing identity, chants, and manifestos, reflecting the ideological diversity within Pakistan's feminist movement at the time.
Together, the simultaneous emergence of the Aurat March and Aurat Azadi March on the same day marked a genuinely new wave of coordinated, multi-city feminist street activism in Pakistan, unprecedented in scale and public visibility. The dual mobilizations demonstrated that Pakistani feminism was not a monolith but encompassed multiple strands — liberal, socialist, and intersectional — that could nonetheless act in solidarity around International Women's Day.
This day is now remembered as a turning point that catalyzed years of subsequent annual organizing by both movements.