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........

© Dawn