Hijab Agitation: Election-Time Disruptive Manufactured Piety

The grandest of mosques as well as the humblest ones, in India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, all of Arabia, and around the world, do not let Muslim women pray in them. They are exclusively male provinces, adults and children alike, when the faithful are called to prayer five times a day.

Women are expected to pray at home. Some places allow women to congregate separately in the open courtyards outside the mosque buildings.

In many parts of the orthodox Muslim world such as current day Iran, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, women are still required to be covered head to foot in burkhas when they go out. Any violations are dealt with harshly. There are religious police keeping vigil.

The separation of the sexes in public areas, beaches, swimming pools, the ability of women to step out with men who are not their husbands or brothers, their ability to seek or continue in employment, run businesses, or drive cars are by no means automatic entitlements. This unlike their male counterparts, married or unmarried. The restrictions placed on female attire also varies from country to country in the Islamic world.

But, overall, it is clear that Muslim men control the narrative on what is permissible. It is therefore rare to see any agitation led by women in Islamic countries.

However, in India, the CAA agitation at Shaheen Bagh in Delhi where arterial roads connecting Delhi to Noida were blocked by squatting agitators for months, was almost exclusively peopled by Muslim women. When it  spread to other parts such as North-East Delhi, Hyderabad and Kolkata, once again there were almost exclusively women protestors, sometimes ensconced with their young children. As a consequence, the authorities were forced to treat the agitators with kid gloves despite their illegal and mostly unauthorised occupation of public areas not designated for protests.

The sudden appearance of the Hijab agitation in some schools of Karnataka, spreading outside them to Maharashtra and Delhi, has been called violative of the ‘religious freedom’ of Muslims. This is how the Popular Front of India (PFI), a hard-line Islamic organisation, peopled by men, framed it. Its student wing The Campus Front of India, (CFI) ‘counselled’ some Muslim young women to prioritise Hijab wearing in schools over the need to receive education in the last quarter of 2021. The agitation then began in December 2021. Many Muslim women subsequently joined the CFI themselves.

In Delhi, the Students Islamic Organisation (SIO), the student wing of the Jamaat-e-Islam Hind is reportedly working on spreading the agitation  nationally, with its epicentre in Delhi.

The Congress Party has come out in support of the demand to wear Hijabs to school. Lawyer and former Foreign Minister Salman Khurshid has called the Hijab ‘row’  an issue of freedom of choice. Lawyer and former union minister of different ministries Kapil Sibal has sought to move the hearing on the hijab ban  from the High Court in Bengaluru to the Supreme Court (SC) in Delhi. In addition, a separate plea has been filed in the SC on the subject.

Pakistan’s foreign ministry has made bold to summon a senior embassy official Suresh Kumar in Islamabad to condemn the Hijab ban in Karnataka. Its foreign minister has also tweeted on the subject, accusing the Indian government of refusing education to young Muslim women and attempting to confine them to Islamic ghettos. India reacted by Suresh Kumar calling all these comments and accusations ‘baseless’.

Malala Yousafzai, now married and safely ensconced in the UK, has demanded that young Indian Muslim women be allowed to wear the Hijab in Karnataka schools. She finds it ‘horrifying’ that they are not allowed to. This after being shot in the head for merely attending school in Pakistan, circa 2012.

The Hijab agitation comes shortly after Pakistani franchisees of important international companies active in India such as Hyundai and Kia Motors, Suzuki Motors, Toyota, KFC, PizzaHut, international car battery companies, and so on, issuing advertisements in favour of the Pakistani version of Kashmir Solidarity Day and ‘right to freedom’. That this was followed by a slew of apologies from the parent companies for the unauthorised use of their names, is how that ended.

So, spontaneous agitation this is not! It is likely more sponsors will emerge in the coming days for a familiar toolkit keen on promoting riots, a bad investment climate for foreign investors, and painting the present government as communal. Some media organisations abroad are already wading in.

However, for now, Karnataka, via their School Education Department of Karnataka under Section 133(2) of the Karnataka Education Act, 1983, has  called for  school goers to wear clothing which protects ‘equality, integrity and does not hinder with public order’. A round-about way of saying respect the uniform. This directive has led to some schools banning the Hijab. Madhya Pradesh, likewise has followed suit.

The legal plaint against the ban has been referred to a three-judge bench of the Karnataka High Court including its chief justice, and efforts to get the Supreme Court to intervene have not borne fruit.

There is a raging debate in the media on the pros and cons of the Hijab agitation at this time when five states, notably Uttar Pradesh with a sizeable Muslim population, are going to the polls. It is seen by some as an effort to influence female Muslim voters and blunt the favourable impression many have developed towards the BJP. This not just for a vast improvement in law and order parameters in Uttar Pradesh but also after the central government outlawed arbitrary verbal, phoned, emailed and whatsapped Triple Talaq. Other TV warriors have, of course, been waxing eloquent on religious rights.

The demand to be allowed to wear Hijabs to schools over and above the uniforms in Karnataka and the religious trend it implies, are not universally seconded by young Muslim women across the country. In Bihar, young Muslim women went on the rampage, pelting stones at the gates of their hostel, after being asked to wear burkhas on campus. They said the superintendent of their hostel in Bhagalpur was trying to implement Taliban style Sharia Law in the hostel. The authorities are looking into their complaints.

Meanwhile, anti-hijab protests, mostly of young Hindu men in saffron scarves and turbans, in counterpoint and counter-polarisation, have sprung up. Hindutva organisations such as Hindu Jagrana Vedike (HJV), Bajrang Dal and Hindu Janajagruti Samiti, Sri Rama Sene, have reportedly asked students affiliated with them to organise these protests. The organisations have also sought to draw in other Hindu youth.

What is clear this time is that the various Toolkit Warriors are not getting a traffic free one-way street for their manufactured protests. Countering efforts have been quick to react. There is both polarisation on one kind and counter polarisation of the other kind. It is likely however that agitations on both sides of the fence will disappear once the five assembly election results are out on March 10, 2022. Till next time the elections roll around in 2023.

(1,163 words)

February 11^th, 2022

For: Firstpost

Gautam Mukherjee