DENIAL OF EDUCATION TO HIJABI STUDENTS A VIOLATION OF THEIR FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS All India Lawyers Association for Justice   https://ailaj.wordpress.com/2022/03/18/karnataka-high-court-decision-on-hijab-denial-of-education-to-hijabi-students-a-violation-of-their-fundamental-rights/

The Court in its judgment makes no substantive attempt to engage with the fact that this judgment is likely to deny education to many young Muslim women, who are already marginalised, and struggle to access education.
Second, the right to wear a hijab, should have never been premised on whether it's an essential religious practice or not. ... such a framing is problematic, including that it (a) denies agency to Muslim women by deigning hijab to be a mandate rather than a choice (b) essentialises Islam as a “universal and non-bending” religion, and (c) reproduces the patriarchal idea of a maulvi being the final arbiter of Islam.

The Court’s interpretation of Article 19 and Article 21 is based on “derivative rights” for instance, has no constitutional basis. The Court understands derivative rights as rights that “do not go to the core of substantive rights as such but lie in the penumbra thereof”. As per the Court, “the protection that otherwise avails to the substantive rights as such cannot be stretched too far even to cover the derivative rights of this nature”. The second reasoning of the Court to restrict the Petitioners’ Article 19 and Article 21 freedoms on the understanding that schools are “‘qualified public places”, like courts, war rooms, defense camps,  etc, where essential freedoms can be curtailed for the purpose of discipline and decorum is worrying. Such an understanding of fundamental rights is unprecedented, and makes the very basic claim to fundamental rights in and by itself an exception.

The heart of the problem here is the Court’s placement of uniforms over all other factors including learning as the central force of and reason for education. At one point the Court states “no reasonable mind can imagine a school without a uniform.”