Triple challenge of the hijab

To presume all women sporting the hijab are unthinking followers of Islam is to deny them agency

On a piece of cloth called hijab, Hindutva has chosen to project its fury against Indian Muslims. This fury has been in the making ever since the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was established in 1925 - and has scaled a new peak over the last seven years. From targeting Muslims for consuming beef to disallowing them from praying in public places, the Hindutva brigade has now brought the hijab into its crosshairs.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has yet to articulate his sense of the hijab. Yet, judging from the past, he is likely to echo colonial rulers who portrayed their rule as a civilising mission. Like them, Modi trumpeted his decision to ban and criminalise triple talaq as a historic measure to liberate the suffering Muslim women. Late last year, on the day his government declared its intent to raise the legal age of marriage for women from 18 to 21 years, he sniggered, "Everyone can see who has a problem with it."

Obviously, Muslim men, whose religion allows them to shackle women, or so Hindutva believes.

But the Karnataka government's controversial hijab order is about harnessing the notions of modernity and liberating Muslim women for the larger Hindutva project of assimilation, of effacing from public life distinctive markers of all religious identities other than those bearing the stamp of Hinduness.

For the proponents of this project, hijab is bound to appear as a red rag, more so as the number of Muslim women in higher education has registered an impressive growth. For instance, the Indian Express reported that the Gross Attendance Ratio - that is, the ratio of Muslim women aged 18-23 years in college to the total number Muslim women in that age cohort - increased from 1.1 per cent in 2009-2008 to 15.8 per cent in 2017-2018 in Karnataka. A percentage of them sport the hijab, a sight Hindutva presumably considers unbecoming of the land of Hindus.

Only this can explain Karnataka's sudden decision to disallow Muslim students to wear the hijab to classrooms, a veritable throwback to the policy of unveiling France undertook during its occupation of Algeria. Frantz Fanon, the anti-colonial intellectual, described the French psychology thus: "Let's win over the women and the rest will follow." Who would not, it was presumed, wish to be liberated from the veil? And so, Fanon argued, "Every new Algerian woman unveiled announced to the occupier an Algerian society whose systems of defence were…. breached."

It is this breach Muslim students have chosen to plug, boycotting classes unless they are allowed to attend them wearing the hijab - and accepting the high cost their "politics of refusal" will invariably entail. This form of refusal was also witnessed when the French government, in 2004, banned students from displaying religious symbols in public schools. Private institutes mushroomed to cater to the religiously inclined. By 2020, according to academician Carol Ferrara, there were 70 Muslim, over 7,500 Catholic and over 200 Jewish schools in France. It would seem the French government's secularism has not bred uniformity.

The hijab protest challenges not only Hindutva but also liberal-feminist politics. Liberalism emphasises individual reason for distinguishing between what is socially and morally right and wrong, than committing to action only because it is divinely ordained. The traditional view of feminists and liberals is that the hijab symbolises the inequality between the sexes, for it lays the onus on women to protect themselves from sexual predators.

It can be argued that liberalism and feminism, pursued to their logical end, should have their votaries reject religion altogether. If not for anything else than the "illusory happiness", as Karl Marx said, religion creates and prevents the people from realising their "real happiness." Liberal-feminists have instead chosen to debate whether the Quran makes it mandatory for the woman to wear the hijab. There is ijma or consensus among different schools of Islamic jurisprudence that covering the head is mandatory for women. But this consensus has been increasingly contested.

Yet, to presume all women sporting the hijab are unthinking followers of Islam is to deny them agency. American scholars such as Saba Mahmood and Leila Ahmed have shown that countless women became religious or took to the hijab in their later years, after reading religious texts and reflecting over them. For these women, apart from fulfilling functional needs, hijab is an expression of their religiosity as well as resistance against attempts to erase a crucial part of their identity. It may even be seen as a revolt against the soullessness of modernity. This is as true of India.

As we await the Karnataka High Court's judgement on the hijab, it may help feminists and liberals to acquire perspective by remembering how the Sangh tried to stall the implementation of the Sabarimala judgement. Or by wondering why Delhi's Indian Institute of Mass Communications has a Saraswati idol at its entrance gate - and several schools in Delhi organise pujas. Or why Modi participated in the bhoomi pujan before the construction of the new Parliament began. Once they stop perceiving women of faith as so many sheep, they will see that the hijab controversy is designed to Hindu-ise the public life, which is precisely what Karnataka's hijab-wearing students are opposing.

The writer is a senior journalist.
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