The headscarf triggers a national migraine – The Sunday Guardian Live – The Sunday Guardian

The hijab forced on a woman is bad, but equally bad is forcing her not to wear oneagainst her will lies the slippery path towards sheer defiance.

Chaotic. Tragic. A sensitive situation on the ground that turns increasingly tense, even dangerous, by the day. A completely uncalled-for mess now embroiling the nation from what began as a stand-off within a small pre-university government college (PUC) in Udupi, coastal Karnataka. As is well-known now, some six young Muslim girlscoming to attend physical classes when the PUC reopened after the long Covid haulwere ordered to remove their headscarves before they could enter the classroom to conform to the uniform/dress code instituted earlier that year by the college management committee (CMC). The girls refused, claiming to have dressed like this only all along. The authorities stood firm: the presence of headscarves disturbed uniform discipline and so had to be removed before the girls could enter the classroom. The girls went home.Whatever the facts about this sartorial change, the question bears asking: why on earth did the college focus on this moot point in the midst of the worst-ever education crisis? At a time when schools and colleges are re-opening tentatively after the extended Covid shutdown? Surely the need, everywhere, is to normalise school/college attendance and prepare for the examinations barely weeks away? Most particularly so, in the case of these girls barred entry to maintain discipline who happen to belong to what is universally acknowledged as the lowest segment of the educational pyramid?The new National Education Policy is committed to dramatically uplift Gross Attendance Ratios (GAR) by almost 50% in the decade ahead. (GAR is the proportion of age group in school/college to the total population in that eligible age group.) The age group in the higher secondary/college stage is the one most critical to the educational stream if the proposed increase in the age-at-marriage and the greater empowerment and employment of women is to be realised. Shouldnt that make it vital to help those already in schools/colleges to continue instead of creating new obstacles in their already obstacle-ridden lives? Can positive changes be imagined via state/institutional coercive-actionparticularly in the case of the young who must abide by familial authority while yet coping with a rebellious phase of life?Muslim womens literacy rates are far lower than those of any other religious community and far below the overall national average (51% versus 67% at last count); drop-out rates too are far higher than the national average (17.6% against 13.2%); their entry into the higher education stream is altogether abysmally low despite a tremendous pick-up in recent years. Analysis of a decades data of National Sample Surveys recently reported shows the female GAR (18-23 age group) made marked strides overall between 2007/8 to 2017/18. All-India the GAR figures practically doubled for the Hindu category but significantly more than doubled for the Muslim category. Karnataka shows a veritable educational revolution and most impressively for Muslim women: while GAR for Hindu women more than doubled, from 11.8 to 23.8, that of Muslim women streaked from a paltry 1.1 in 2007/8 making a fifteenfold leap to a GAR of 15.8 in 2017/18. Udupi itself has a concentration of PUCs and colleges situated as it is in close proximity to Manipal University.There is a pithy Punjabi saying: Dhaunu am khane hun ke ghutliyan ginniyan hun? In other words, do you want to eat the mangoes or count the sucked-cores? Mixing metaphorical fruits let me ask: why upset the applecart, especially when things are going so well?Within days Udupi became the eye of a dark storm that has spiralled uncontrollably, swirling across all Karnataka, even other states and regions. Karnataka saw schools and colleges shut for days; then reopened after a grim paramilitary flag march through Udupis streets in the wake of violence marring protests. From elsewhere, a courageous confrontation between a lone hijab-wearing woman and a jeering slogan-chanting male-mob went viral. Many parts of the state have Section 144 imposed around schools and colleges. The matter is in Karnataka High Court. However, the courts Interim Order to reopen schools/colleges but not allow religious symbols of any kind in institutions with CMC guidelines did not help matters. Rather, the crisis aggravated as the administration issued a strict government order refusing to allow the hijab inside all campus sites and positioned police to monitor. Over the past week, girls refusing to divest the hijab have been turned away; many more have simply stayed away. A few have refused to sit even for preliminary exams when not allowed to retain their hijabs. From an accessory worn through long habit the headscarf or hijab has metamorphosed into a proud identity marker.In court the issue escalated from a single judge to a full bench. At the time of writing, the Court remains in hearing as lawyers debate conflicting fundamental rights and constitutionality issues. Meanwhile, hurt psyches have provided welcome grist to political-mills. Political slugfests parallel street-protests, charges of conspiracy and alleged links to sinister organisations are being traded. Equally, media channels have a field day raising TRPs with minute-by-minute breathless reporting (self-claimed thus by one leading channel), endlessly repeating provocative visuals and conversations that further fuel furies. The High Court verdict is much awaited. Yet it is already anyones guess that the outcome will not rest the matter there. Appeal to the Supreme Court (earlier refused to be entertained, awaiting High Court judgement) lies on the cards. A protracted battle stretches with no easy answers. The only certainty is the deleterious effect on the education of the most-lagging subgroup in Indian society who, sadly, are collateral damage.I cannot help but recall here an episode from an early part of my own life that offers interesting illuminating insight. The year was 1952. The Constitution was baker-fresh and the hangover of the British Raj still strong in educational institutions. Then thirteen-years-old, I had already transferred across a dozen schools alongside my fathers frequent transfers. To provide stability to my last two school years my parents had brought me to Tara Hall in Shimla, arguably then the most famous girls boarding in North India. But the post-admission list to equip my stay posed a problem: skirts and blouses stipulated as compulsory uniform. Punjabi households move post-puberty daughters to don salwar-kameez. I too was comfortable with ankle-length salwars hiding spindly legs and wobbly knees!The parents were adamant in asserting tradition and the Mother Superior was aghast. But seeing my downcast face as I feared missing out on the opportunity to enter Taras hallowed halls, she conceded with a gracious smile. 70 years later her words ring strong in my ears, offering a model that needs emulation: Let not petty differences about a mode of dress spoil this childs chance to imbibe the best education. Please make sure her salwar-kameez is of identical material and colour so that overall uniformity of appearance remains and confirms discipline.That cloistered nun had the enlightened bandwidth to tweak her institutions well-established dress-code rather than miss out giving education to a child-in-need. A lesson that our present-day institutions, and courts, could do well to hearken. I might add that I look back at that period as having taught me to handle my very differently-dressed-self with dignity amongst peers initially both overly-inquisitive and teasers. But the experience added strength to character-developmentnot its undermining.Later, as one championing womens rights, I instinctively thought of the hijab as regressive and urged courage to cast it off. But another perspective evolved when I visited Istanbul in 2007. Turkey was still very cosmopolitan then, battling to join the European Union. However, Istanbuls streetsand the ferries plying by the half-hour across the Bosporus Straits that divides the larger Asian mainland of the city from its opposite edge on the European continentwere already chock-a-block with Turkish women and girls, many beautiful in tantalisingly fashionable veils that Kemal Ataturk had outlawed a century earlier. Elegantly dressed, often in Western clothes, very modern-looking young women sat, walked, laughed, chatted, holding their own in mixed groups, but quixotically in hijabs, although Turkey was then nowhere near its present extreme-right swing.The scene was the ever-growing reaction to Frances hostile ban of Sikh turbans and Muslim veils from schools and streets a couple of years before, as I learnt through conversations with myriads of hijab-clad women. Our grandmothers and great-grandmothers may have been forced but we choose, they told me. What right does Europe have to tell us not to wear our symbols? They think the bikini, even nudity is OK, but not the veil. We now wear to show the Western world that Turkish women are equal and Turkey sovereign.That glimpse highlighted for me that hijab forced on a woman is bad, but equally bad is forcing her not to wear oneagainst her will lies the slippery path towards sheer defiance.Furthermore, Priyanka Gandhi Vadras mindless pitch on the right to wear a bikini or a hijab only highlights the travesties to which a judicial ruling vindicating personal choice as an unfettered fundamental right could lay open the area. Conversely, forceful assertion of French-style secularism opens the Pandoras box for many sacred items, from black threads to karas, bangles and bindis et al with capacity to create endless mayhem. Trouble brews at either end of the spectrum. The only way is the middle wayand enormous sagacity and statesmanship to steer the issue along it. Attributes scarce in these troubled times.

Rami Chhabra is a media veteran, who pioneered the first feminist columns in the national press. She has served the country in various capacities, including in GoI and as Member, National Population Commission.

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The headscarf triggers a national migraine - The Sunday Guardian Live - The Sunday Guardian