By Sushil Kutty
The Karnataka hijab row now goes to the Supreme Court after the Karnataka High Court ruled that the hijab is not essential religious practice in Islam, and there’s clear and present danger that the row will escalate to the “national stage”, which was what the high court had feared would happen when it gave its interim order.
The high court also declared that a school uniform is rightly a reasonable restriction on Article 25, the freedom of practicing one’s religion. The three-judge bench dismissed the petitions, saying there was nothing in them to consider. The petitioners did not agree. One of them declared that it would take the judges “30 years” to know what all practices are essential in Islam.
This person probably does not know that courts hear experts in such matters and don’t have to go back to school. In this case, they did not have to enroll in Deoband or some such Islamic religious school in Turkey or Saudi Arabia. Besides, the budding hijab movement had been hijacked by the radical Campus Front of India, the students’ wing of the Popular Front of India.
The CFI has no role in setting the dress code in government schools, but it has been behaving as if it can, and it would. True to expectations, the CFI rejected the high court verdict. The radical students’ body went further and said the CFI will back the hijab-girls all the way to the top court.
But what if the Supreme Court also rules that the hijab is not essential religious practice? The hijab-proponents are on thin ice. Most legal experts are of the opinion that the Supreme Court will not be springing a surprise. There are precedents and the operative word is “progressive”, especially when it comes to women.
Whether or not the hijab is essential practice could be divisive, but there is no two ways that the hijab is considered regressive practice in many Islamic countries. And more Muslim women worldwide are fighting wearing the hijab and the burqa than there are Muslim women climbing barricades to embrace the hijab or the burqa, come rain or sunshine.
The problem is, the hijab has been politicized, and weaponized. Within hours of the Karnataka high court verdict, and not soon after the CFI delivered its own ruling on the hijab row, protests had broken out in Tamil Nadu even as ‘hijabi students’ in Karnataka chose to “boycott exams.”
True to expectations, “hijab over kitab” told the story better than the court verdict. The Campus Front of India refused to waver from “hijab is essential practice in Islam.” A CFI leader wondered at “which direction India is going.” Clearly, the Constitution of India is facing competition from the tenets contained in a holy book.
Then again, the hijab case was not just another court drama. Everybody thought the full bench of the Karnataka high court would deliver a verdict that would be accepted by everybody, at least not so summarily rejected as it has been by the CFI.
The hijab row has brought India face to face with Islam, so to speak. There is only one choice here: Bow, or there will be no quarters given. It’s not that the Karnataka high court broke new ground. Before Karnataka, there was the Kerala high court with a similar verdict. But the Kerala high court ruling was not rejected.
The Karnataka high court order speaks of an “unseen hand” behind the hijab row even as the needle pointed to the CFI. There is also truth to the allegations that the hijab narrative was cooked and played up to influence voting in the just-concluded Uttar Pradesh assembly elections.
The UP results went in favour of the BJP and it’s clear that there was sharpened Hindu-Muslim polarization going into the elections in India’s most populous state. The Congress loss in all five states combined with the Kashmir Files, now also the hijab-verdict, have given the BJP reason to celebrate, to spread the word that Hindus were wronged under Congress rule and, now, under BJP rule, the chickens were coming home to punish the Congress.
The din in the corridors of power was rising as Prime Minister Narendra Modi compared Attenborough’s ‘Gandhi’ with Vivek Agnihotri’s ‘Kashmir Files’ and asked why certain people were losing sleep at the release of “truth”? This, when in cinemas across the length and breadth of BJP-ruled states, screening the ‘Kashmir Files’, the RSS “anthem” was being sung with the people singing giving the Zogist or Albanian troops’ salute—hand held against the chest with the palm facing down and parallel to the ground. Strange! (IPA Service)
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