Girls being denied entry to classes at a pre-university college in Udupi, Karnataka, for wearing hijabs. (Photograph: The Quint)

By Priya Ramani

Harassing young women has always been a favourite pastime of the patriarchy. It’s an even more exciting sport when you add Islamophobia or casteism.

The idea of fraternity, included in the preamble of our Constitution at the insistence of BR Ambedkar, a week after the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, has been shredded repeatedly in recent times. Preventing six students from attending classes for 35 days because they want to cover their head for religious reasons, a constitutional right under Articles 25 and 26, is only the latest instance of this.

The ongoing hijab twister swirling around six teenage schoolgirls in Udupi, Karnataka is yet another Hall of Fame moment for homegrown Islamophobia. The hijab as objectionable item debate has been ongoing since 1989, when a French principal expelled three girls from his school in 1989 for wearing headscarves—in what came to be known as the affaires de foulards.

Everyone has a strong opinion on this subject, and I’m inclined to like the one proffered by Joan Wallach Scott in her book The Politics Of The Veil. “The intense debates about passing such laws serve another purpose as well: They offer a defense of the European Nation states at a moment of crisis,” the author says.

In the context of France, she argues: “The objectification of Muslims as a fixed ‘culture’ has its counterpart in the mythologising of France as an enduring ‘republic’. Both are imagined to lie outside history—antagonists locked in eternal combat.”

“France vs Muslims…is the result of a sustained polemic, a political discourse,” she adds. Now apply this argument to the desperate attempts to bypass the rights of 200 million Muslim citizens as we remake India into a Hindu rashtra. Every teenage veil counts. Already, the controversy has spilled over to at least one other college in the district.

Apart from the fact that it’s not really about the hijab, the Udipi case highlights at least two key truths about Indian society.

First, too few people focus on the real pain Indian women face. While we discuss ad nauseum what women should be allowed or rather not allowed to wear, 10 million girls are at risk of dropping out of school because of the pandemic, according to one projection last year putting them at risk of early marriage, trafficking, and poverty.

Even as education has largely been dependent on access to digital technology these past two years, north Indian villages continue to issue diktats on whether or not unmarried Indian women can use mobile phones. Didn’t you know? Phones make women elope. Controlling women’s access to the world outside is a well-worn practice here. As one news story put it simply: she is offline.

All this is only the tip of what Indian women battle every day.

Yet, and this is the second truth about the hijab controversy, Indian women find the strength to fight back. “Earlier the violence was invisible and unreported,” Manjula Pradeep, a leading Dalit rights activist told BBC in 2020. “Now we have visibility. Now we are stronger and more assertive. Much of the violence now is to remind us of our boundaries.”

According to news reports, one of the teenagers in Udupi has filed a writ petition in the Karnataka High Court for the right to wear a hijab.

For a teenage Muslim girl to stand against the might of an educational institution and the toxic masculinity of Hindu extremists and male students who think they have proved a point by participating in a ‘saffron shawl campaign’ to demand their colleges enforce a ban on hijabs, must require tremendous moral courage.

She must know the risks of taking the matter to court. While there have been at least two instances of high courts upholding an Indian woman’s right to wearing a hijab, there was also the time the country’s apex court noted: “If you appear in an examination without a scarf, your faith will not disappear.”

The Udupi teenager’s courage reminds me of the time last year when 22-year-old climate change activist Disha Ravi, said in court: “If highlighting farmers’ protest globally is sedition, I am better in jail.” It reminds me of the rage and despair expressed on camera by the friends of a teenage girl who was murdered in Uttar Pradesh when she stepped out to study. It’s a hat tip to the who have filed cases against those who put them up for sale on the internet in two recent online “auctions” of Muslim women.

Here’s a lesson from the past for the Muslim teenagers in Udupi. Sometimes it can take just one six-year-old girl to change the course of history. In 1960, Ruby Bridges became the first African American student to integrate an elementary school in the southern United States.

She went to school escorted by armed federal guards, ate lunch alone, studied, and played with the lone teacherwho volunteered to teach her and never missed a day of school.

According to one account, as she walked past crowds screaming racial slurs on that first day, she said she only felt scared “when she saw a woman holding a black baby doll in a coffin”. I see the courage of Ruby Bridges in so many Indian women.

This story first appeared on bloombergquint.com