Sneak peek of Swara's first wedding night. #SwaraBhaskerWedding pic.twitter.com/NJR03cKtz7

— Ňเнa𝐑ίᛕ𝐀 (@Ni_hari_ka) February 17, 2023

This is the first hindu trad ethot I'm seeing btw @himachalite are they common? This one's rather underwhelming I had higher hopes for a weeb trad ethot.

It'll be smaller than your's

We weren't talking about your mother

You want to become my mother?

you have to be really cheap and disgusting to talk like this about other women

What about your i want to love 🥵

Akansha* could feel anxiety well up inside her as she sat opposite her date. So the 26-year-old began fidgeting with the cutlery on the table and avoiding eye contact.

But then her date leaned in and told her that it was okay to be anxious, and that she could steady herself and appear less nervous by clasping her hands under the table and taking a deep breath.

The person opposite her wasn't a real date, but a "dating surrogate" - someone hired to go on mock dates with her, observe her behaviour, and share tips and insights in real time to help her deal with anything preventing her from enjoying herself.

Akansha says she turned to a dating surrogate, a service offered by the Intimacy Curator - an online platform providing "dating, relationship and intimacy coaching services" - about three months ago.

It's among a bunch of firms and apps - such as Dating Accelerator andhaveyoumeturself - that have come up in India over the past few years, pointing to a shift in the way relationships are formed and perceived in the country. While the majority of Indians still opt for arranged marriages and pre-marital s*x is mostly a taboo subject, these companies are teaching their customers new ways to date and fall in love.

Their users - mostly people who live in big cities and follow global trends - vary in age and what they are looking for. Some, like Akansha, want to shed their inhibitions around dating, while others may be trying to relearn the rules around relationships.

People who sign up for The Intimacy Curator's dating surrogacy package - which can cost anywhere between 12,000 rupees ($145; £120) and 80,000 rupees - participate in various online sessions held by dating coaches. They explore questions including why they want to date and what they're looking for in prospective partners. Then they're assigned a dating surrogate who plans mock dates and coaches them.

"The experience helped me get comfortable with being on a date," says Akansha.

Akansha came out as queer a few years ago and says that while it was liberating, it also threw up problems in the dating arena. She found it hard to date women because while she came across many how-tos and dating guides for cisgender (non-transgender), heterosexual people, it was tough to find resources around dating etiquettes for queer people.

When she went on dates, she was confused by questions such as who should hold open the door or pull out a chair for the other person - chivalrous gestures conventionally performed by men.

"As a woman, I also knew how compliments made me feel objectified at times. But while I didn't want to be perceived as a creep, I also wanted to express my interest," she says.

Simran Mangharam, a dating coach, says "Gen Zers" such as Akansha are "more pragmatic in their approach to s*x, dating and relationships".

"They are choosing to date based on their needs and lifestyle choices, rather than following long-held Holy Grails of dating, like finding a life partner or entering monogamous relationships," she adds.

That partly explains why situationships - which lie somewhere between a committed relationship and a casual hook-up - were among last year's top Gen Z dating trends while ethical non-monogamy or multi-partner relationships have been on the rise.

Aili Seghetti, founder of the Intimacy Curator, is also one of the five dating surrogates it offers. To help Akansha become comfortable with dating women, Ms Seghetti went on three dates with her - to an art gallery, on an outdoor walk and for dinner.

On the dates, Ms Seghetti would give feedback to Akansha about her body language, share tips on how to manage anxiety, and grooming and styling advice.

"It's scary and awkward to ask a person if you can put your arm around them or kiss them, but the mock dates helped me get comfortable with having these conversations," says Akansha, adding that she has been on many successful dates since then.

But while some like Akansha find the swiftly-changing dating space exciting and inclusive, it can be a minefield for others, especially if they are returning to the dating game after a hiatus or have had a conservative upbringing and are now dating people with a different value system or relationship vocabulary.

Mumbai-based Rajeev*, 40, went on his last date in 2012. When he tried to re-enter the dating pool about a year ago, he was confronted with a range of things he had no idea about, from terms such as "ghosting" and "dry dating", to people stating their preferred pronouns or saying they wanted open relationships.

Rajeev says he had always found it difficult to connect with women. Having experienced childhood trauma and battled substance abuse, he struggled to trust people and talk about himself on dates. The changed world of dating added to his discomfort and made him feel lost.

But with the help of his surrogate date, Rajeev gradually learnt to ask women out, flirt and practise consensual physical intimacy. She also helped him find the best way to talk about his difficult past, identify and process his emotions and communicate them in a safe way.

Since the quest to find love could include rejection, Rajeev was also taught to reject his date and be rejected by her. He and his surrogate date roleplayed the scenario, where she told him over a phone call that she didn't have romantic feelings for him.

"The scariest part about dating is rejection," he says. "But I learnt that it's okay to end things that aren't working for me, and to respect someone else's decision when they feel the same way."

Ms Seghetti says that the point of her work isn't to help people manipulate their way into another person's heart, but to help them take a journey into their own.

"The point about these mock dates isn't to help you spew the best pick-up lines or become a skilled serial dater. It's to help you understand yourself better so that you get better at revealing yourself," she says.

"After all, vulnerability is a must for any kind of intimacy."

*Some names have been changed on request

Why Tata Nano Failed in India 😃😅🔥😀#PulwamaAttack #AirIndia #GodavariExpress pic.twitter.com/X1JOr36kls

— Gaon Ke Gawaar (गाँव के ग्वार) (@BPruty) February 15, 2023

God bless 🙏🇮🇱

— GITA 🇮🇳 (@GitaSKapoor_) February 14, 2023

Eelam rights is Dravidian rights ie

@velvetllamasblackson discuss

Capitalists

Austere ethical code

This news. Not pozzed assimilationists like lindus

A day after Acharya Lokesh Muni, along with a group of other religious leaders stormed off the stage at an event of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind expressing objection to its chief Maulana Arshad Madani's “Om and Allah are the same” statement, the prominent Jain monk on Monday said he could not tolerate the insult of his religion and culture in front of his eyes.

“I would rather accept my martyrdom. I can't tolerate the insult of my religion and culture in front of my eyes. So I protested and challenged the debate,” Muni tweeted.

Meanwhile lindus sing ishwaro allah tera naam unironically.

I am not even going to talk about the article.

My question is how will India go about taking back the Pakistani land once they fail?

My guess is when Pakistan finally collapses we won't take it all at once.

Instead we will first go and capture the rest of Pakistan occupied Kashmir while sending the Kashmiris living there to the real Pakistan.

After we have done this we will probably push for recognition of independent territories within Pakistan similarly to what we did with Bangladesh.

Everytime Pakistan fails we create another independent chunk from it.

I figure cutting away Pakistan like this could be done easily within another 100 years and the smaller pieces will be easier to digest when Bharat has to expand.

What do you think bharatbros?

Andaman Sheekha reported on it on January 6, 2022, “The white sphere shaped object, looking somewhat like weather balloon, attracted many eyeballs because of its size and shiny white surface.” This description matches the balloon that was shot down by the US last week.

Even Andaman and Nicobar Command PRO had then told Andaman Sheekha that the object is not related to the ANC. The local newspaper had then asked: “Now, the question is which agency has placed the object in the sky and why? If this object is not released by any agencies in Andaman then was it sent for spying? But in this age of ultra-advanced satellites, who would use a flying object to spy?”

More than a year later, indications, as per all these reports are that the balloon was Chinese and probably was over Indian airspace violating Indian sovereignty at a time that India and China were (and still are) engaged in a major standoff on the disputed border. It is not known if the government of India was able to identify the object or if it registered a diplomatic protest with the Chinese government.

US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman on Monday briefed nearly 150 foreign diplomats across 40 embassies, reports Reuters. This is likely to include India, but the Indian government has not issued any official statement on the subject so far. The US State Department has also sent to every US Embassy “detailed information” on the espionage that can be shared with allies and partners, as per the newspaper.

They'll come take @Sasanka_of_Gauda with them

trans lives matter not too ayylmaos

General Pervez Musharaff's granddaughter. Ab bole bhi to kya. pic.twitter.com/bR9OOuKLXJ

— Aryāṃśa (@arya_amsha) February 12, 2023

To be honest, since 2015 or 2016, I’ve struggled to make annual best movie lists because there have not been enough contenders. So unpopularity wasn’t completely unwarranted, but things got very toxic in the last few years, and Bollywood movies have been underperforming. The Marvel films that release in India and Telugu blockbusters like RRR outperform Hindi movies even in Mumbai, which is the center of the Hindi film industry.

Bollywhore's strongest defender

There has been a relationship between Bollywood and the government, but that relationship stopped at freedom of expression. Many film stars may have had their own political opinions, but that did not stop them from making movies that were expressive, and that were brave, and that were secular in many ways. Communalism and religious prejudice have always plagued this country. It’s just that this current particular establishment has weaponized that compared to the previous ones. Why? Because Bollywood has maximum influence over the masses, and they realized very quickly that this medium is how they will get their ideas across.

Because of that, the government has broken many of the powerful people in the industry into some kind of submission.

Ken ye say we bucked them laddies?

If you go to the most obscure foreign country, the one name people will know is Shah Rukh Khan. They’ll name one of his movies from the ’90s or hum one of his famous songs. He’s been an icebreaker for Indian travelers all over the world. He’s been that icon for three decades.

SRK himself is a Muslim actor, and even if he’s playing Hindu characters in these films — which was mostly the case — there’s always a sense in the back of your head that this is a superstar who’s very open about his religion, who’s not ashamed of his religion, who doesn’t hide his religion. The current government has wanted stars to cozy up to its Hindu nationalist narrative. Shah Rukh Khan, though, has resisted and kept his silence, which has become a statement. He hasn’t spoken up for the government as much as a lot of the other celebrities in this country, so you always feel like he hasn’t conformed and he is not broken.

Goodness gracious I just want to grill

And that's Khan covertly dogwhistling a desire to burn Modi on a stake more at 11

All this reached a head last year when the saga with SRK’s son unfolded. Aryan Khan [then 23] was arrested and jailed on trumped-up drug charges. As ironic as it may sound, that’s when the tides turned against the right-wing government and toward SRK. People felt the government went too far. It was too blatant. They went after a Muslim superstar and everyone’s favorite hero. That’s part of Pathaan’s success as well.

Nooo you can't arrest famous people's children you're only supposed to arrest irrelevant poors

The significance of the title is that patriotism isn’t a Hindu birthright anymore. It’s not tied to a certain kind of religion. I see a lot of people criticizing the fact that SRK’s character doesn’t say he’s an Indian Muslim. We don’t know his real name — Pathaan was given to him by a family he met in Afghanistan. But it’s not about what kind of Muslim you are or where you come from. It’s the fact that your love for your country, your love for film, your love for people, your love for art in general, should not be hijacked by one particular community.

These people are just going to pretend the first president bhajipao nominated wasn't a based patriotic muzzie lmao. Rest in peace missile man.

When I started watching the film, two scenes in the beginning scared me. The first scene shows a Pakistani general vowing to destroy India, and the second is SRK’s introduction, where he tells someone to only speak in Hindi, a metric that this current government has been really pushing down our throats in the last 10 years. I was quite wary.

But then if you read deeper into a silly film like this — and it is silly on its surface — I don’t think the vilification of Pakistan exists as people think it does. The main female actor, Deepika Padukone, plays an ISI [Pakistan’s CIA] agent who rebels against her own government, who does not agree with what the ISI is doing, and says that her people would never agree to biological warfare against India. That Pakistan is the Pakistan that we don’t see in Hindi movies enough.

As long as you're a hot Paki foid willing to betray your people you'll get a nice peepeeing instead of a bullet

Tangential Paki sneed

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/feb/03/bollywood-pakistan-muslims-narendra-modi-india

Bollywood has always reflected Indian political trends; the films of the 1950s mirrored the optimism and romance of the newly independent country, the 1970s hero was a proud but disenfranchised man fighting against the powerful and corrupt. In the 1990s, there were endless films about neo-liberal yuppies who worked in Dubai, danced in London discos and drove shiny Mercedes. Since Narendra Modi and his rightwing party, the Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP, came to power nearly nine years ago, Bollywood has readily embraced his menacing politics.

God looking back those 90s films were suicide inducing levels of cringe.

In 2018, the starlet Alia Bhatt headlined Raazi, a film about a woman who marries a Pakistani army officer in order to spy on the country during the 1971 war with India. In 2019, Bollywood released Uri, a military flick about Indian special forces launching a “surgical strike” on Pakistan after a supposed terror attack. Though Uri was based on a real incident that nearly brought two nuclear-armed states to war, it played fast and loose with the facts.

All this is especially unpleasant as Pakistanis have traditionally been enthusiastic audiences for Bollywood – the industry brought us songs and fun and the profound knowledge that our neighbours look and live just like us, demonstrating the incredible power of culture done right.

If after 60 years of being fed bollyslop they still want to kill us its obvious that isn't the case though

I interviewed Khan, or SRK, as he is known to his hundreds of million fans around the world, for a book five years ago and noticed even then that he straddles an uncomfortable role as the ever grateful Muslim who is really, really, really Indian. As India embraces the Hindu majoritarian politics of its ruling BJP party, high-profile Muslim figures like Khan are increasingly seen as fifth columnists. Trolls and angry protesters often beseech Muslim stars to “go back to Pakistan”, though they have no roots there. Today in India, anyone who questions the government or dissents from popular discourse is slandered as “anti-national” and told to go live in Pakistan.

Imagine liking the country that made you famous and rich. You should hate it and fund blasts in it that's how you can be a true Muslim.

Khan’s film Pathaan provides cover and does much needed glamour work for the Indian state and the gross abuses that the abrogation of article 370 resulted in: the longest internet shutdown to take place in a democracy, the arrest of thousands of Kashmiri protesters, the sending in of thousands of paramilitary troops and untold other human rights violations. To set up an event such as the degradation of Kashmir as a fun plot point – those who are against the revocation of article 370 are homicidal maniacs and those who defend it, such as Khan, are valiant government agents with pectoral muscles – is beyond tragic. The political project of Modi’s quasi-fascist BJP cannot be set to fun music and helicopter stunts, try as Bollywood might.

The context is what makes it even funnier though. We will flood Kashmir with Biharis and they VILL like it.

A byproduct of Modi’s visceral hatred of Muslims has been a strengthening of ties between India and Israel during his tenure. In 2017, Modi became the first Indian premier to visit Israel, where he and Benjamin Netanyahu enacted the bromance of two image-obsessed prima donnas by posing barefoot on beaches. Beyond photo ops, trade between the two countries now amounts to close to $8bn, with India now the largest buyer of Israeli military equipment in the world.

Many have argued, myself included, that Pakistan, burdened as it is by a failing economy, decades of terrorism and the humiliations of the war on terror is undergoing a cultural renaissance. Pakistani film-makers are making movies about trans love stories, female desire and the toxic societal power of patriarchal fundamentalists, and producing music that questions the divisions and partitions between us and our Indian brothers and sisters. And so it is doubly strange to watch what is happening across the border, where culture is no longer a medium used to extend conversation but rather a means to snuff it out.

So true bestie. You empower those s more we'll continue being chuds.

A lot of people say that it’s cruel to talk about box office numbers. I used to look down on these figures for the longest time, but every morning I check them. For better or worse, it’s a measuring stick for the conscience of the nation right now.

Conscience of the nation.

She had better been paid for this level of bootlicking.

Soon no baby jirl will be safe

Casteist slurs are not satire!

Students at Jain University, Bangaluru insulted Babasaheb and made casteist humour against the SC community.

Such casteist & insensible skits are an attempt to mock the Depressed Classes. pic.twitter.com/QwPexm3fim

— Suraj Kumar Bauddh (@SurajKrBauddh) February 10, 2023

Is it malicious editing?

https://x.com/dintentdata/status/1624285278516183041

Insult is insult, no matter in which part of the video.. calling Beer Ambedkar is not acceptable in any part of video even though there is possitive remarks in the end. Nothing in misleading in the viral clip.. throw out casteist mentality before checking facts.

This is why I'm just blatantly casteist.

But uncle, you abuse every Brahmin, Thakur, Baniya, even OBC without remorse. Ye hypocrisy nahin chalegi.

Did anyone abuse Brahmin saying that you are untouchable, cannot touch water etc? Get a life. You are the reason dalits are running away from Hinduism.

Can they run away faster plox Feels like we'll be gassing muzzies within a decade I want to get two birds with one stone.

Jains are casteist… equally as much as a baman… privilege in india makes one casteist… that’s a strange disease

I wonder why all the competent people have the same opinions on gibs demanders.

NGL.. it was hilarious! A confident lot will not feel offended at every small thing. Thand rakkho. Just bcoz Jain college students joked about you, doesn’t mean your reservation % will come down. You’ll keep getting freebies.

Sick people 😡😡 dusra content nahi mila comedy ke liye 🤦

In sab logonke upar strict action lena chahiye, in logonki himmat kaise huyi Bharatratna Dr.Babasaheb Ambedkar ji ka apman krne ki. Ye ham kabhi sahan nahi kr sakte.

Chup chamar

According to a report by India Today, the man, identified as Hamara Prasad, was arrested by the police after he recorded a video making provocative remarks against Dr BR Ambedkar. In the purported video, he held a book by Dr BR Ambedkar and said, “I would have killed Ambedkar like how Godse shot Gandhi."

@cyberdick why can't you be more like him?

Meh it's the same with English rappers in the US and Canada. Talking about biches, money and sX.

Not really bro, shit is real around here. I had the misfortune of growing up in these ghettos. Me and my brother were always at “war” with scum in the area we lived in— only b/c we chose to not be like them. Alhumdullilah, we made it out in timely fashion due to the efforts of my parents.

Paki thinks he's better than them.

I'm not Sidhu's fan but it was rare to hear or see vulgarity in his music vids. Couldn't really relate to his music. But Being a jutt is synonymous w/ gun culture and manliness amongst Indian Punjabis. It's their thing. On top of that Sidhu was starting to rap about Punjab issues. Which made him a threat to the Indian establishment. So they took him out.

Bro he didn't just make music on guns and shit. He actually made thought provoking music. For example, he made a song on Punjab and how it has been shafted. The Indian government has banned that song from YouTube. And it was released after his death.

Moosewala did glorify all of the things you Stated but he also spoke about A LOT of problems in India. He was against the shit Indian government pulls on the Sikh people and openly talked shit about them. He also talked about how the government treats the Indian Punjab horribly. He even mentioned Kashmir in one of his songs. Obviously dude made song that glorified the gun culture but he still made songs about real problems too. All and all, he still didn’t deserve 30 bullets in his stomach for making songs that glorified guns/violence and gangster culture.

Wrong. The success of Punjabi rap artists like Moose Wala and Bohemia demonstrates the genre's ability to connect with audiences and address issues that are relevant to people's lives. Even Moose Wala's music often addressed social and political issues in Indian Punjab, such as Modi government's brutality against Sikh farmers.

Is making kkkhalistanis druggies a gayop to turn all of pakjab into druggies.

So true, I grew up in a rough neighbourhood with second generation Afro-Carribeans and West Indians in the UK. Let me tell you something, those were natural born gangsters. They were like wild pit bulls because they were raised by single mothers and grew up in poverty. Most ended in Jail or dead. Compared to these middle class Pakistanis acting like gangsters 🤣🤣🤣

So your argument is that his music is irrelevant because he didn't actually sell drugs and kill people?

Yeah, same concept as a war veteran talking about war but never actually went to war but passing it off as truth.

Lol hilarious.

Only people who listened to Bohemia were sexually frustrated Isloo teens and middle class OSP’s who wanted rap in desi flavor. Success of Punjabi rap follows the same formula of commercialized rap where s*x, drugs, and violence sells. Music like this has only exploited troubled desi youth it has never empowered them.

Look at this clown pointing out anecdotal evidence when someone else tries to make a point, but using it himself in a matter-of-fact manner. This is just ironic, and I pity you for being blind to your own ignorance. It’s just the high and mighty attitude coupled with you thinking you’re spitting facts which is making me nauseous. You have absolutely no argument, you’re essentially arguing the same thing as video game violence = increase in real world violence. This has been absolutely proven to be false in the majority of literature in psychology, I’ve published my own meta-analysis of this for my mini-dissertation and there’s no evidence of a causal relationship.

Lots of after this

Did you just compare Tupac and Biggie to an imposter? This guy came from a middle class family, he was sent abroad as an international student for higher education. This man was a fake gangster rapping about a life he never lived. On his last days he was in contact w/ the POLICE to get protection against death threats he received online. This goes very much against his supposed gangsta persona. He promoted gang violence and gun culture and yet never lived a day of it. Why I have a gripe of hearing trash music like this in restaurants and weddings?— I’ll leave that open to interpretation.

Bigger reserves than amrikkka now baby

WARNING!

DO NOT under ANY circumstance, reply to @himachalite with this emoji

Zahad was in the middle of a gender reassignment procedure to become a man in India's Kerala state when he and his partner decided they wanted a family.

At that point, the 23-year-old's breasts had been removed and he was undergoing hormone therapy that was deepening his voice, producing a moustache, and making his body more muscular.

Next was the removal of his female reproductive organs. But Zahad and his partner's desire for a child led him to pause his transitioning treatment and try for a baby.

Zahad, who goes by one name, was born a girl but identifies as a man. Partner Ziya Pavel, 21, was born a boy and is transitioning to become a woman.

The transgender couple, who live in the city of Kozhikode, have became India's first to have a baby.

Zahad gave birth to a healthy, 2.9kg baby on Wednesday, a few weeks before her due date in early March.

New mum Pavel said in an Instagram post that she shed "tears of happiness".

Breast milk from the hospital milk bank will be used to feed their family's new arrival.

Zahad and Pavel had decided they wanted a family together after dating for two years but knew adoption, given their situation, would have been fraught with problems.

As Zahad still had his ovaries and uterus, the couple thought it would be easier if he paused his gender reassignment treatment so he could conceive.

“I felt so strange and weird in my body as my tummy grew bigger and bigger,” Zahad told This Week in Asia on Tuesday. “But we knew we wanted a baby and for me it was a chance to be both a mother, in giving birth, and the father once my transition is complete.”

Zahad is from a Christian family. His mother, after initial reluctance, has accepted his new identity and the pregnancy.

Pavel has not been so lucky. Her Muslim parents and siblings shunned her at an early age, preventing her from pursuing her passion for classical dancing, which she now teaches at a local transgender centre.

Pavel recalls how relatives would cite Koran passages, warning of hellish consequences in the afterlife for “people like me”.

“They conjured up all these awful images of the punishments I will get but none of that matters to me. I knew who I was. I am happy with Zahad and even happier now that I am going to be the mother of a baby,” Pavel told Indian media.

The couple are well aware of some of the difficulties that lie ahead. Pavel’s dance classes do not pay well, nor does Zahad’s job in a local supermarket. When they go out they are used to getting strange looks, so were hesitant to post images of their pregnancy photo shoot on Instagram.

But nevertheless, there is no coyness in the pictures. Pregnant Indian women tend to cover their tummies demurely with a large dupatta (scarf) but that was not how Zahad chose to be photographed.

The images of Zahad’s naked belly in a variety of dramatic poses with Pavel have been widely shared on social media, drawing both praise and criticism.

Attitudes towards India’s estimated two million transgender people have been changing gradually for the better, although progress varies hugely from state to state.

Transgender people have become news anchors, mayors, chat show hosts and beauty queens. Kerala, in particular, has promoted several pro-transgender policies including reserving a certain number of government jobs for people who have changed s*x.

Now that their baby has arrived, Zahad and Pavel will decide on a time to resume their hormone treatment to finish the transition.

Zahad is clear about one thing. It is all very well conceiving, being pregnant, and giving birth, but now the baby has arrived, he is officially a dad.

My first thought after reading the form to express interest in volunteering at Pakistan’s annual Women’s March was: how many women in Pakistan know what “non-binary” and “cis woman” mean? In a country with a literacy rate of less than 50% for women, who was Aurat March hoping to attract with this questionnaire? Instead of being inclusive, the menu of gender options would probably make a majority of Pakistani women feel unqualified to participate, effectively excluding the aurat from Aurat March. But maybe that was the whole point.

Aurat March is set to take place on International Women’s Day, March 8th, across the country — for the sixth year running. It has been riven with controversy ever since its first iteration in 2018, when slogans like “Mera Jism, Meri Marzi” (“My body, my choice”) caused public outcry, the event being deemed un-Islamic. It’s common to hear Aurat March and the ideology it supports described as “foreign funded”, to advance “Western interests” in Pakistan.

My stone my choice

Why bend over backwards to champion the rights of Pakistan’s transgender community (a mere 0.24% of the population), instead of trying to extend an olive branch to the majority of the country’s 220 million citizens, men and women, in language they can understand? In her 2017 book, The New Pakistani Middle Class, Ammara Maqsood argues that, since the Nineties, “progress” in Pakistan has been defined by connections to the outside world. It is only when “an imagined audience, an outsider that needs to be addressed and convinced” believes that Pakistan is modern that Pakistanis will see themselves as modern, she writes. Concerned about how they’re portrayed on the global stage, elite Pakistani feminists want to signal to their comrades in the West: Look, we’re not the backwards and uncivilised country that we seem to be, we believe trans women are women. This tactic seems to be working, looking at the glowing coverage Aurat March gets from mainstream news media in the West, which frames the movement as an “Us versus Them”, zero sum game for which Pakistani feminists are risking their lives. But who exactly is “them”?

Chuds, that's who

The Aurat March would have it that “they” are “radical, Right-wing Islamists”. But the truth is, “they” are the millions of women who — having ascended to middle-class life since the Nineties — reject the idea that modernity in Pakistan must operate in lockstep with the West. These women instead embrace “Islamic feminism” and aspire to be part of the global Muslim community, turning to countries like Turkey for inspiration. They advocate for women’s rights within an Islamic framework, encouraging women to interpret the Quran and highlight the teachings of equality in the religion.

Internalized misogyny

But if Aurat March were to abandon this language, and incorporate terminology and manifesto demands more in line with the growing Islamic feminist movement in the country, its international brand would be irreparably damaged. Fighting for environmental justice, demanding to defund the police, and putting transgender politics at the centre of one’s activism — all part of Aurat March’s 2022 manifesto — is much more palatable to readers of the New York Times than engaging in “backward” practices like debating what rights women have in Islam. If Pakistan’s elites dared do such a thing, the West would write off the nation as another “shithole country” overrun by Islamists. Feminism’s status as a “luxury belief” would fall away — and so too would the Pakistani elite’s sense of itself.

Btw this is a Paki Canadian writing.

Judging from their volunteer form and most recent social media activity, Aurat March is comfortable with its solid position on the “lifestyle Left”. It promotes questions of identity, consumption, and moral attitudes over tradition and community. The annual event has become nothing more than an exercise in intellectual gatekeeping: a reminder to the upwardly mobile masses that the definition of modernity in Pakistan is a way for the established elite to preserve their dominant position in society. There is no room for either the new and growing middle class, or concern for the working-class women who can’t even read — let alone win a Rhodes scholarship.

Keep the poors in their lane