A dispute over restrictions on the wearing of the hijab by female students in a southern Indian state has now reached India’s most populous state of Uttar Pradesh, with a group of youngsters asking a college to ban the head covering. Authorities closed colleges in Karnataka in India’s south last week after a new uniform policy barred students from wearing headscarves in classrooms, leading to protests by Muslim students and counter-protests by Hindu students.
Muslims have criticised the ban as another way of marginalising a community that accounts for about 13% of Hindu-majority India’s 1.35 billion people. In Uttar Pradesh, in the country’s north and bordering New Delhi, a group of more than two dozen young men reached the Dharma Samaj College in Aligarh district on Monday and handed a memorandum to its officials seeking a complete ban on the hijab within its compound.
They had saffron shawls around their necks typically worn by Hindus said the college’s chief proctor. Currently, religious garb is not allowed in classrooms but can be worn elsewhere on campus. Two years ago the same issue was raised and it has been raised again. There is a changing room for girls and they can change their dress there before attending class. Uttar Pradesh, estimated to have as many people as Brazil, is ruled by a Hindu monk from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party and is in the midst of a multi-phase election that ends next month. Hindu-Muslim disputes are often used for political gains in the state.
The hijab row follows a string of online attacks against Muslim women in India. In early January, the Indian government was investigating a website that purported to offer Muslim women for sale. It was the second time in less than a year that a fake online auction of that kind sparked outrage in the country. On Tuesday, Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, called the hijab row horrifying.
Objectification of women persists — for wearing less or more. Indian leaders must stop the marginalisation of Muslim women, she wrote on Twitter. The All India President of the Students’ Federation of India, V P Sanu, criticized the hijab ban, saying it was used “as a reason to deny Muslim women’s right to education.
Modi referred briefly to Muslim women in a speech in Uttar Pradesh Thursday as that state started voting in local elections. The Prime Minister said his government stands with every victim Muslim woman. He didn’t refer to the hijab ban but said the government gave Muslim women freedom by scrapping the controversial Muslim practice of triple talaq, which allows a Muslim man to divorce his wife by simply saying the Arabic word for divorce, talaq, three times.
The Indian government criminalized the practice in 2019. Every religion has freedom, India is a unity…every religion has freedom. The confrontation illustrates the religious divide that’s been widening in Karnataka since a group of girls began protesting outside their government-run school in January after they were denied entry in the classroom for wearing a hijab. The girls petitioned the state’s top court to lift the ban, prompting rival protests from right-wing Hindu students.
Activists say the hijab row is yet another example of a broader trend in India — one that has seen a crackdown on India’s minority Muslim population since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP came to power nearly eight years ago. They say that by denying Muslim women the choice to wear the hijab, the government is denying them their religious freedoms, enshrined in the Indian constitution.
