K Krishnan

1. The ban on hijabs in Udupi classrooms and campuses is a hate crime. The Hindu supremacists lynch/segregate/boycott Muslims on various pretexts - beef, Muslims’ collective prayers, azaan, the skullcap, Urdu language. Hijab is only the latest pretext to impose apartheid on Muslim women.
2. The video from Udupi of a saffron-stole wearing mob of men surrounding a hijab-wearing Muslim woman and heckling her is a warning of how the hijab can easily become the next pretext for mob attacks on Muslims.
3. We firmly believe that the Constitution mandates schools and colleges to nurture diversity, not uniformity. Uniforms in such institutions are meant to minimise differences between students of different and unequal economic classes. They are not intended to impose cultural uniformity on a diverse country. This is why Sikhs are allowed to wear turbans not only in the classroom but even in the police and Army. This is why Hindu students wear bindi/pottu/tilak/Vibhuti with school and college uniforms without comment or controversy.
4. Muslim women wore hijabs to college in Udupi in the past without any objection from the authorities of these colleges. It is not hijabs that provoked the ongoing educational disruptions. It is ABVP which disrupted harmony by staging demonstrating with saffron stoles in “protest” against hijabs. Banning both saffron stoles and hijabs is not a fair or just solution because unlike hijabs worn by some Muslim women, the saffron stoles are not everyday clothes, they are political protest-wear meant to intimidate Muslims and college authorities.
5. Making hijabi women sit in separate classrooms or move from colleges of their choice to Muslim-run colleges is nothing but apartheid. Hindu supremacist groups in coastal Karnataka have, since 2008, been unleashing violence to enforce such apartheid, attacking togetherness between Hindu and Muslim classmates, friends, lovers. It must be remembered that such violence has been accompanied by equally violent attacks on Hindu women who visit pubs, wear “western” clothes, or love/marry Muslim men. Islamophobic hate crimes have been joined at the hip to patriarchal hate crimes against Muslim and Hindu women - by the same Hindu-supremacist perpetrators.
6. We are appalled that the Karnataka Home Minister has ordered an investigation into the phone records of hijab-wearing Muslim women, to “probe their links” with “terrorism groups”. Till yesterday Muslims were being criminalised and accused of “terrorism” and “conspiracy” for protesting a discriminatory citizenship law, or indeed for protesting against any form of discrimination. Now Muslim women wearing hijab is being treated as a conspiracy - in a country where women of many Hindu and Sikh communities cover their heads in much the same way, for much the same reasons; and even India’s first woman PM and President covered their heads with their saris without exciting comment or controversy.
7. Girls and women should be able to access education without being shamed or punished for their clothes. Educational institutions should pay attention to what is inside students’ heads not what’s on them. We stand with every woman who is told that she can’t enter college because she’s wearing jeans or shorts - or because she’s wearing a hijab.
8. We unequivocally stand in solidarity with Muslim women whether or not they wear hijabs, to be treated with respect and to enjoy the full gamut of rights.
9. We unequivocally stand by women who are resisting patriarchal dress codes that demand “modesty” from women and shame them for “immodesty”. We tell the patriarchs within every community - Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian, and others - stop shaming women for clothes or conduct that you deem to be “immodest”. Stop trying to tell women what they must wear in order to be respected - instead respect women no matter what they wear. If you think a woman “exposes herself too much” or does not “dress like a good Hindu/Muslim/Christian/Sikh woman”, the problem lies with your patriarchal gaze and sense of entitlement.
10. Hijabs or pallu or ghoonghat or sindoor no doubt have their moorings in the patriarchal notions of “modesty” or “chastity”. However, women adopt these practices for a variety of reasons and motivations. Whether or not one wears any of these markers, cannot be the test for one’s feminist principles. Feminism lies in respecting that every woman charts her own path in fighting patriarchy. Wearing hijab or pallu or observing certain fasts and other practices is not anti-feminist: but shaming women for not wearing these clothes or By Kavita krishnan