Aurat March organized a 'Feminist History' themed march in Lahore on Pakistan's National Women's Day, honoring the women of the historic February 12, 1983 protest.
On February 12, 2025, coinciding with Pakistan's officially observed National Women's Day, the Aurat March collective organized a special commemorative march in Lahore under the theme 'Feminist History.'
The date itself carries deep symbolic weight: February 12, 1983 was the day when the Women's Action Forum and allied activists staged a landmark protest march in Lahore against General Zia-ul-Haq's proposed discriminatory Law of Evidence, which would have reduced the legal weight of women's testimony. That 1983 protest, met with police violence including tear gas and baton charges against women including elderly participants and lawyers, is remembered as a foundational moment in Pakistan's women's rights movement, and the date was later formally recognized as National Women's Day.
By explicitly linking the 2025 Aurat March to this historic 1983 demonstration, organizers sought to root the contemporary movement within a longer genealogy of Pakistani feminist resistance, honoring pioneering activists and lawyers who risked arrest and violence decades earlier under martial law.
This commemorative march represented an important act of historical memory-making, countering narratives that dismissed Aurat March as a foreign import disconnected from local tradition, and instead positioning it as the direct inheritor of a decades-long indigenous struggle for women's legal equality and public voice in Pakistan.