UDUPI, India — An
Indian court has said that students in the
southern state of Karnataka should stop wearing religious garments in class
until it makes a final ruling on whether a school there can ban Muslim
headscarves, an issue that has stoked weeks of protests and violence and led
the authorities to close schools across the state.
اضافة اعلان
Muslim student organizations reacted with dismay to the
statement issued late Thursday by the Karnataka High Court in Bangalore, the
state capital. One said that students were being asked to “suspend their
faith.”
The ban on wearing the hijab, imposed by a school for girls in
the city of Udupi, has become a flash point for the battle over minority rights
in India. In January, the parents of five students petitioned the court to
overturn the ban, arguing that it violated the girls’ right to an education and
the free practice of their religion.
Last week, the government of Karnataka issued an order in
support of the school’s hijab ban. The Karnataka government is controlled by
the Bharatiya Janata Party, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a Hindu
nationalist whose eight years in power have been marked by a rise in hate
speech and religiously motivated violence.
Karnataka’s chief minister, who closed schools this week because
of the unrest, has said that ninth- and 10th-graders would return to class on
Monday, with a decision to be made later about 11th- and 12th-graders.
The court’s final ruling on the ban could be days or weeks away.
“We think it’s really unfair to ask Muslim women to suspend their faith for a
few days while the court completes its hearing,” Fawaz Shaheen, national
secretary of the Students Islamic Organization of India, a Delhi-based group
with over 9,000 members, said of the court’s Thursday statement.
The conflict began in September at a college preparatory
institution for girls in Udupi, a city in southwestern Karnataka. When several
Muslim students showed up in hijabs, some teachers whose class they tried to
attend turned them away and marked them absent for the day, according to the
petition. In prior years, wearing headscarves at the school had not been an
issue, according to one of the petitioners.
The students’ parents encouraged their daughters to stand their
ground, according to their lawyer, Mohammed Tahir. They continued to wear the
hijab after the school, Government Women’s PU, moved in January to ban it on
campus, saying it violated the school’s dress code. The school issued the
prohibition after meeting with a local lawmaker from Modi’s party.
“Then the issue started blowing up,” Tahir said. “Whenever
students would go in hijab, they wouldn’t be allowed inside the compound, too,
let alone the classroom.”
In recent weeks, the students have been routinely met at the
campus gates by scores of boys and men wearing saffron — the color most
associated with Hinduism, often worn by supporters of Hindu nationalism — and
shouting slogans such as “Hail Lord Ram,” referring to the Hindu god.
The unrest also spread to at least a dozen other school campuses
in the state. On Tuesday, officials ordered schools to close for three days as
the police struggled to respond to intensified demonstrations.
At one campus, a boy climbed up a flagpole, hoisting a saffron
flag as others in saffron scarves cheered below, according to video from local
TV news reports. At an engineering school, video showed, a girl arriving in a
hijab and robe was met by a large group of boys shouting Hindu slogans. She
shook her fist at them and shouted “allahu akbar,” or “God is great.”
As the formerly fringe view that India should become a more
explicitly Hindu state has found a mainstream advocate in Modi, Amnesty
International and other human rights watchdogs have warned that religious
animosity could spiral out of control, perhaps even emboldening Hindu
extremists to commit genocide against India’s Muslims, who make up about 15% of
the country, and 13% in Karnataka.
Secularism is a cornerstone of India’s Constitution, but the
line between the state and religion has blurred in recent years, with a
saffron-robed Hindu monk at the helm of the government in the state of Uttar
Pradesh, and the prime minister frequently seen on television performing Hindu rituals
and prayers, observers said.
“What does the government think secularism is in general in
public space? This is what must also be argued in court,” said Karuna Nundy, a
constitutional lawyer.
“If the government wants to take a stand against public displays
of religion, it has to take that stand in all cases,” she added. “Otherwise it
is just naked persecution of minor girls and playing out religious politics on
girls’ bodies and denying them education.”
India’s Constitution protects religious practice unless it
interferes with morality, health or public order. The BJP-controlled state
government said in its February order that the students’ hijabs did just that.
“Clothes which disturb equality, integrity and public law and
order should not be worn,” the government said.
After the parents appealed the decision to the High Court, a
single-judge bench considered which right had primacy: the students’ right to
religious expression or the government’s right to check it when it says law and
order has been affected.
The judge, Justice Krishna S. Dixit, consulted the Quran and the
Hadith to determine whether the hijab could be viewed as an essential religious
garment in Islam, and considered the turbans of followers of the Sikh religion,
who are exempt from law that requires motorcycle riders wear helmets.
Devadutt Kamat, a lawyer representing the students’ parents and
a Hindu, noted that his own son wears a Hindu religious mark on his forehead in
school.
The issue of wearing the hijab in school has come up before in
India. In 2018, a High Court judge in the southernmost state of Kerala decided
that a private Christian school had the right to bar its students from wearing
headscarves.
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