Aurat March in Islamabad Ends After Police Stop Marchers: What Happened in 2025 and Why It Keeps Happening

What happened on the day

By the press account available, events ran as follows.

1. Before the day. Organisers applied to the Islamabad administration for the certificate that the capital requires for any public gathering. One of the organisers, a well-known academic and activist, told reporters the application had sat unanswered for months.
2. The authorities’ position. Officials did not approve the event. They suggested it be put off, as 8 March fell in the fasting month.
3. The organisers’ decision. They went ahead, but scaled the event down. There would be no music or theatre.
4. 1pm. Participants began to assemble outside the National Press Club, carrying placards.
5. About 4pm. They tried to set off for D-Chowk. Police lines and barriers blocked the road. Routes into the government quarter near two well-known junctions were closed to traffic.
6. Afternoon. After speeches where they stood, the march was called off.

Nothing in the report seen describes a baton charge, injuries or arrests. That is a contrast with 2023, when police struck marchers outside the same press club and three officers were suspended afterwards.

Nobody was hurt and nothing was broken. A group of citizens asked to walk to their own Parliament and was told no. That is the whole story, and it is why the story matters.

The geography of protest in Islamabad

To understand the dispute you need three places.

Reaching D-Chowk is the point of any march on the capital. It is where a protest is seen by those in power. It is also where the largest and most violent confrontations of recent years have happened. The authorities’ instinct is to keep every crowd away from it.

The rules

What the Constitution says

So the right exists, and so does the power to restrict it. Everything turns on what is “reasonable”.

How it works in practice

• The certificate. Organisers must obtain a “no-objection certificate” from the district administration. It usually comes with conditions on route, time and loudspeakers.
• Section 144. An old provision of the criminal procedure law lets an official ban gatherings in an area for a limited time. In Islamabad it is in force for much of the year.
• The 2024 law. In September 2024 Parliament passed a public order law for the capital. It requires written permission in advance, lets the government designate a particular place for all gatherings, and provides prison terms for taking part in an unauthorised one.

Rights groups argued that the 2024 law turned a right into a favour. The government said the capital could not be shut down every few weeks by whoever wished to march on it.

Why the Aurat March in particular

Many groups are denied permission to reach D-Chowk. The Aurat March meets a second layer of resistance that most do not.

What it is

The Aurat March (“women’s march”) began in Karachi on 8 March 2018, organised by women’s collectives with no party behind them. By 2019 it was being held in Lahore, Islamabad, Hyderabad, Peshawar and other cities, each organised locally.

Its demands, set out in a manifesto each year, are broad:

• an end to violence against women and to harassment at work and in the street;
• equal pay, maternity leave and childcare;
• recognition of women’s unpaid work at home and in the fields;
• access to justice, health care and public space;
• rights for religious minorities and transgender people;
• an end to enforced disappearances and to police violence.

Why it provokes

A handful of placards drew more attention than the manifesto. One slogan, usually translated as “my body, my choice”, became the centre of a national quarrel. To the marchers it meant freedom from violence and forced marriage. To their critics it sounded like a rejection of religious and family values.

Each year petitions are filed in the courts asking that the march be banned. The courts have generally declined, holding that women have a constitutional right to assemble, while asking organisers to keep within the bounds of decency.

The counter-marches

Since 2020 religious parties and their women’s wings have held their own events on or near the same day, under names such as “modesty march”. These have usually been allowed to go ahead. Marchers point to the difference in treatment. Officials reply that each application is judged on its own security risks.

The Ramazan question

In 2025, 8 March fell in the first week of the fasting month. This shaped the marches everywhere.

The Islamabad administration’s suggestion that the event be postponed was therefore not unusual in itself. What the organisers objected to was that they were given no decision at all, and so nothing they could take to a court.

Two views of the same afternoon

Both views contain something true. The march has been attacked by others, and police do have a duty to prevent that. But protecting marchers from attack and preventing them from marching are different things, and the second is easier.

Women and the capital’s streets: a short history

The Aurat March did not invent women’s protest in Pakistan. It inherited it.

• 1983, Lahore. Women lawyers and activists marched against a law that reduced the weight of a woman’s evidence in court. Police met them with batons and tear gas. The photographs became the founding image of the modern women’s movement.
• 2007 to 2009. Women were prominent in the lawyers’ movement that restored a sacked chief justice.
• The health workers. The women who carry vaccines and advice from door to door, known as lady health workers, have staged some of the longest sit-ins the capital has seen, camping at D-Chowk for days to demand regular pay and pensions. They were allowed to reach it.
• The teachers and nurses. Both professions, largely female, have marched on provincial assemblies many times.
• Winter 2023 to 2024. Baloch women camped for a month outside the same press club where the Aurat March gathers, after being met with water cannon on arrival.

Seen in that line, the question is not whether women may protest in Islamabad. They always have. It is why a demonstration about pensions is allowed to reach Parliament and a demonstration about women’s freedom is not. Marchers say the answer is the content of their placards. Officials say it is the threat from those who object to them. Those are two descriptions of the same fact.

What organisers can do when an application is ignored

The difficulty in 2025 was not a refusal. It was silence. There are a few established ways to deal with that. None is quick.

1. Apply early and in writing, and keep the receipt. A dated application is the foundation of everything that follows.
2. Ask a court to order a decision. The High Court can direct the administration to decide an application by a set date and to give reasons. Judges in Islamabad have done this for other groups. A reasoned refusal can then be challenged; silence cannot.
3. Offer conditions. Proposing a route, stewards, a finishing time and a limit on loudspeakers makes a refusal harder to defend.
4. Document the day. If a peaceful gathering is blocked, a clear record of what happened is the basis for any later complaint.
5. Use Parliament. Members can raise the matter in either house and ask the interior minister to explain.

Organisers of the Islamabad march have tried most of these over the years. The lesson they draw is that the courts will usually uphold the right in principle and seldom in time for the eighth of March.

What has changed since

The year and a half after the 2025 march brought more movement in the law than in the street.

• May 2025: a law for Islamabad set 18 as the minimum age of marriage.
• November 2025: Balochistan passed a similar law.
• January 2026: Parliament passed a domestic violence law for Islamabad.
• April 2026: Punjab’s assembly passed its own child-marriage law.
• 2026: Pakistan rose a few places, from last, in the World Economic Forum’s ranking of equality between men and women.

Several of these were demands that appear in the march’s manifestos. Organisers would say that is no coincidence. Their critics would say Parliament acted on its own.

On the right to protest, movement went the other way. The public order law of 2024 remains in force, and the capital’s guarded zone has been closed to most demonstrations, of every kind, for much of the time since.

Does marching work?

It is a fair question, and the marchers themselves argue about it.

The case that it does. Before 2018, subjects such as harassment, unpaid housework and consent were discussed in universities and non-governmental organisations, in English. The march put them into homes, in Urdu and the regional languages, through a few slogans that everyone had an opinion about. Since then Parliament has passed laws on rape trials, workplace harassment, women’s property, child marriage and domestic violence. Organisers do not claim sole credit. They do say the climate changed.

The case that it does not. Critics, including some feminists of an older generation, say the slogans handed opponents an easy target and let them avoid the substance. They point out that the marches draw thousands in a country of 250 million, that most marchers are urban and educated, and that the backlash has made some families less willing to let daughters take part in any public event.

A change of method. In some years the Islamabad organisers have held a rally in a park instead of a march through the streets, to avoid confrontation and to make it easier for working women and their children to attend. Others in the movement regard that as giving up the central point, which is the right to the street itself.

There is no way to settle the argument with numbers. What can be said is that seven years on, the march is still held, still opposed and still talked about, which is more than most protests manage.

If you plan to attend a march

General guidance only. Rules change, and local conditions differ.

Words used in this article

Timeline

For the wider story, read our explainers on the National Assembly and the Senate, where the laws mentioned here were passed.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Aaj English, “Aurat March in Islamabad concludes as police block access to D-Chowk” — 8 March 2025; the main source for the day’s events.
• Aaj English, “Aurat March reaches D-Chowk despite police baton-charge” — March 2023.
• Geo News, “Riot between marchers, police turns things sour at Islamabad Aurat March” — March 2023.
• Wikipedia, “Aurat March” — read in part; last edited 8 September 2026.
• The Express Tribune, “Aurat March kickstarts in February this year” — February 2025.
• Pakistan Today, “Aurat March scheduled for May 10 in Karachi” — 9 March 2026.
• Dawn, “‘Aurat March’ held nationwide to mark International Women’s Day” — March 2020.
• The Friday Times, “Lifeline For Survivors: Understanding Pakistan’s Domestic Violence Act 2026” — 28 January 2026.