By Swati Chaturvedi / HAARETZ
You could hear the collective heartbreak of Muslim girls across India who wanted an education while committing to their religious practice when a state court ruled they could not attend school wearing hijab.
Forcing girls, some of whom are first generation students, to choose between getting educated and wearing the hijab puts them in an untenable position. The Karnataka order is being challenged in India’s Supreme Court which will take a final decision. The Supreme Court seems to be in no hurry to put the matter on its roster.
This whole saga, which has revealed the fragility of India’s inclusivity and the vulnerability of its Muslim population to discriminatory regulations, all started with a tiny school girl, her hair lovingly braided in two plaits, tears pouring down her face, nervously fiddling with her hijab, taking it off and replacing it in the full gaze of more than a dozen television cameras.
She ran to hug her father for reassurance and then handed him her hijab before rushing into her school. Then a school teacher drove up to her school on a scooter, and slowly and painfully pulled off her hijab to be allowed entry to do her job.
Girls and teachers had to run the gauntlet of the cameras and the saffron-clad male mobs jeering at them while screaming Hindu religious slogans.
Muslim girls are being denied education in Karnataka – a BJP-ruled state – for wearing a hijab to class. Both the official whitewashing and the exclusions are fast becoming contagious.
To ensure that the message and the humiliation is loud and clear, Muslim women are made to disrobe in public. Besides the hecklers, the women’s ordeal is televized live across mainstream channels, a mass exercise in punitive voyeurism. While the hijab ban played out in full public gaze, India was voting in five critically important state elections, particularly Uttar Pradesh, and the BJP wants to ensure that the visuals ram home the humiliation of Muslims on its watch.
The hypocrisy of the public square is explicit. Not only Muslim women wear some sort of head covering: Hindu women don what is called a ghoongat (veil). You could be a feminist liberal and be against both: but the important point here is that only one of them has been banned. The BJP has baited the ban as a trap for liberals who don’t want to support regressive religious practices.
Muslims have faced the brunt of communal attacks in the past eight years. Vigilantes publicly lynch Muslims for producing beef: A Modi government minister garlanded released vigilantes. Traditional Muslim occupations like the leather industry and abattoirs have been shutdown in the name of protecting cows, sacred to Hinduism, so much so that herds of feral cattle denuding crops have become an issue in regional elections.
I have argued before in Haaretz that the Hindutva project – a Hindu Rashtra, or imperium – has already reached fruition in the past eight years and India’s proud claim of being the world’s largest democracy is now just that, a claim.
The ideology that animates Hindutva is a simple one line prescription: Hatred for the other. And the prime other, the Muslim, must be forced to erase those markers that identify him as a Muslim. Ever since Modi became prime minister and loftily proclaimed a “New India,” but accessorized with distinctly old prejudices and bigotry, what Muslims wear, eat, work at and whom they love have all been criminalized. At the same time, the Modi government constantly platforms and amplifies the public exhibition of Hindu symbolism and religious practice.
Consider this: The BJP frames the hijab as an attack on the secularism anchored in India’s Constitution and as an affront to a woman’s agency – yet only the hijab offends both. Yogi Adityanath, the saffron-wearing monk who rules India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, has never been asked about the propriety of his wearing Hindu religious markers in the public square, or whether this offends the Constitution.
A BJP member of Parliament and terror suspect, Sadhvi Pragaya Thakur Singh, is always swathed in saffron. Incidentally the right honorable MP is a staunch devotee and advocate of Nathuram Godse, the man who murdered Mahatma Gandhi.
Unlike French secularism, which frowns upon all religious markers in the public square, India is moving towards a highly selective and politically charged form of quasi-secularism. Hindu religious practices dominate the public square and are considered unexceptionable. Coconuts, considered auspicious, are broken at government ceremonies, school children across India sing Hindu religious hymns, some in Sanskrit, and Modi presides over religious ceremonies in temples in his capacity as premier-priest. The ‘secular’ republic of India’s majoritarian Hindu heart has no room for its minorities.
India still abounds in the beautiful diversity of centuries of traditions relating to dress codes. Women wear markers indicating their marital status – bangles and mangalsutra (necklaces). India has a tradition of Jain monks known as digambara, or “clothed by the sky.” They neither possess nor wear any clothes; their adherents have addressed state assemblies with respectful legislators seeking blessings. India also has naga sadhus (naked monks) who live in communes and worship the god Shiva.
The greatest Indian, Mahatma Gandhi, wore a simple dhoti till his dying day. Perhaps that, too, would offend the bigot whose own taste for luxury clothing is so extreme he once wore a bespoke suit whose pinstripes actually spelled out his own name – and heads the country the ascetic, inclusive Gandhi led to independence.
This article first appeared on haaretz.com