THE hijab controversy started in Karnataka, the only BJP-ruled state in the south, after the government imposed a ban on the state’s pre-university girls wearing hijab in their educational institutions that spread quickly and threateningly across the country. It was much more than the story of a teenage Muslim girl’s courage to hold her ground against a mob of Hindu religious fanatics chanting ‘Jai Shri Ram’ to force her to take her hijab off. The controversy reflected the Bharatiya Janata Party’s seriousness to use militant Hindu nationalism to transform India into a Hindu state or Hindu rashtra where Muslims would not be welcomed.
India has the third largest Muslim population in the world, after Indonesia and Pakistan. Muslims ruled India for a thousand years before it became a British colony. Indian Muslim girls wearing the hijab should, therefore, be as natural to the Indians as Sikhs wearing the turban and the Hindus reflecting their religion and castes in their attires, headgears or marks on their faces. The chief minister of Uttar Pradesh Yogi Adityanath dresses and behaves like a Hindu priest without any eyebrows raised. Indians were proud of such diversity in India’s population as unequivocal proof of their country’s democratic and secular credentials and the world respected India for it. The BJP has now placed India’s diversity into jeopardy and with it its democratic and secular credentials.
Anyone using Google to search countries where hijab has been banned would be surprised. A list of about 16 countries, mostly western, will come out in the search including France, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium and Denmark. A hurried reading of the reports will give the impression that the hijab had been banned in these countries. A closer look at France where the sentiments against Muslim women were the worst will reveal a different story. France enacted in 2011 the Law of 2010–1192: Act prohibiting the concealment of the face in public space to deal with headgears worn by Muslim women.
The French law banned headgears such as masks, helmets, balaclavas, niqabs and burqas. The hijab was not included in the list. Likewise, the hijab was not mentioned in the list of the other countries in the Google search. The items that were banned by these countries were those headgears that covered the face that made identification of the individual concerned difficult or impossible. They left hijab out from the list of banned head and face coverings because it does not interfere with the identification of an individual in any way.
Yet, the BJP government of Karnataka issued the order on February 5 that banned Muslim girls from wearing the hijab inside their educational institutions. The Muslim pre-university girl students of Karnataka challenged the order in the Karnataka High Court for the violation of their constitutionally guaranteed fundamental right to freedom of religion. The case flared in the public domain after the video showing Muskan Khan, clad in a black over-all with a matching black hijab and a black facemask, being chased by a mob chanting ‘Jai Shri Ram’ went viral on the internet worldwide. Her face was easily recognisable as that of a beautiful teenage girl.
Karnataka’s BJP government ignored history, ethnicity and demography to impose the ban on the hijab. It also ignored the 1986 Indian Supreme Court ruling on the Bijoe Emmanuel and Others versus the State of Kerala case that granted three students belonging to the Jehovah’s Witness sect of Christians the right not to sing the Indian national anthem under Article 25 on the rights to religious freedom that protected actions or omissions by children in educational institutions based on their ‘genuine, conscientious religious faith.’
Karnataka’s BJP government thus took a step that even western countries, some covertly Islamophobic, had not taken. It did not make any attempt to deal with the ban even after it attracted the attention of the media not just in India but all over the world, in particular in the western media. These coverages were not particularly complimentary to India which is already under the radar worldwide for its treatment of Muslims. The graceful, confident and fearless Muskan Khan challenging the Hindu nationalist mob thus badly dented the image of the BJP and India.
Prime minister Narendra Modi, while campaigning in UP where state elections are underway, wooed the state’s Muslim women by reminding them of his action against the ‘triple talaq’ or instant divorce that Muslim women in the country welcomed wholeheartedly. Nearly 20 per cent of UP’s population are Muslims. The prime minister, however, said nothing to resolve the Karnataka hijab controversy although it showed the potential of becoming a serious Hindu-Muslim communal conflict of national significance.
The BJP allowed the hijab controversy to develop. The reason is not difficult to fathom. There are state-level elections underway in four states including, as mentioned, in the all-important Uttar Pradesh. Two more will be held later in the year followed by more, including in Karnataka, next year leading to the national elections in early 2024. The BJP must win these state elections to gain the momentum for returning to power in 2024.
The BJP is in search of an unbeatable strategy for the next general elections by energising its huge Hindu base because it is aware about the difficulties of returning to power for a third consecutive time. The promise of replicating Gujarat’s economic miracle in India at large combined with Hindutva or Hindu nationalism worked well for the BJP in 2014 elections.
In 2018, enhanced focus on Hindutva spiced with the promise to create the Hindu rashtra of mythology brought the BJP more seats. However, the loss in West Bengal, India’s fourth largest state by population, in last year’s elections was a wake-up call for the BJP that Hindutva or Hindu nationalism with the myth of the Hindu rashtra needed to be re-energised.
Ten to 20 million people were displaced and nearly two million people died in Punjab and Bengal as a result of the partition of India in 1947 in what was one of the worst man-made disasters in modern history. British and Indian historians, in the first few decades after partition, blamed the Muslim League and Muhammad Ali Jinnah squarely for their politics of religious communalism for the disasters. Historians in more recent times have turned such narratives on their heads. The blame for the tragedies related to the 1947 partition is now being placed more on the Congress leaders of the time and the British.
The narratives about 1947 nevertheless did not reflect upon the fate of the Muslims who stayed in the land of their forefathers, in independent India, with a significant change in their political fortunes. In 1947, before India’s partition, the Muslims were one-fourth of India’s population under the British rule. They were reduced to 10 per cent following the mass migration in 1947. They are 14.2 per cent of India’s population today. The Muslims were the victims of regular communal riots so long the Congress dominated India’s politics. The riots were largely instigated by the Congress that would also stop them to appear before the Muslims as their saviours and, thus, the Congress’s ‘vote bank.’
The Congress’s decline and the emergence of the Hindu fundamentalist BJP at the centre and in the states was a net negative development for the Indian Muslims. It took away from them the protection of the Congress. The BJP has now moved towards more dangerous waters for the Muslims. The party is now using them as baits, spiced by the narrative that their ancestors had oppressed and tortured the Hindus during their rule over India to energise its massive Hindu base with Hindutva or the Hindu nationalist mantra to win state-level elections and gain the momentum for winning the 2024 national elections.
An interesting interview of Arundhati Roy by the well-known interviewer Karan Thapar has reviewed the state of Indian politics. The Booker Prize-winning author stated that the BJP’s politics of Hindu nationalism could break up India. She nevertheless felt that the people would resist the BJP’s move and succeed. The Karnataka hijab controversy has underlined India’s ongoing conflict between Hindu nationalism or Hindutva and secular democracy. India and the world must wait to find out the outcome of Arundhati Roy’s prediction. The elections that lie ahead would be the litmus test for the author’s prediction and India’s future.
