SPLIT VERDICT ON KARNATAKA HIJAB

• The Supreme Court on Thursday delivered a split verdict on whether Muslim students should shed their hijabs at their school gates.
• Justice Hemant Gupta upheld Karnataka’s prohibitive government order of February 5, saying “apparent symbols of religious belief cannot be worn to secular schools maintained from State funds”.
• Justice Gupta said ‘secularity’ meant uniformity, manifested by parity among students in terms of uniform.
• Justice Gupta held that adherence to uniform was a reasonable restriction to free expression. The discipline reinforced equality. The State had never forced students out of State schools by restricting hijab. The decision to stay out was a “voluntary act” of the student.
• In his divergent opinion, Justice Sudhanshu Dhulia said secularity meant tolerance to “diversity”.
• Wearing or not wearing a hijab to school was “ultimately a matter of choice”. For girls from conservative families, “her hijab is her ticket to education”.
• “Asking the girls to take off their hijab before they enter the school gates, is first, an invasion of their privacy, then it is an attack on their dignity, and then ultimately it is a denial to them of secular education
• There shall be no restriction on the wearing of hijab anywhere in schools and colleges in Karnataka,”
• He further remarked that one of the best sights in India was a girl going to school like her brother.

Two-judge Bench of the Supreme Court

• A two-judge Bench of the Supreme Court has been unable to resolve the conflict between a girl student’s freedom to wear a head-scarf and the state’s interest in keeping schools a place of equality and secularism.
• It is unfortunate that a clear verdict did not emerge from the elaborate arguments advanced before the Court for and against the Karnataka government’s bar on the wearing of the hijab.
• The split verdict perhaps reflects the division in the wider society on issues concerning secularism and the minorities. Justice Hemant Gupta, rejecting the idea that hijab could be worn in addition to the uniform, has held that permitting one community to wear religious symbols to class will be the antithesis of secularism.
• Justice Sudhanshu Dhulia, on the other hand, has ruled that asking to remove the head-scarf at an institution’s gates is an invasion of their privacy and dignity.
• The issue is why a head-scarf that does not interfere with the uniform cannot be a matter of choice without being a target of hostile discrimination; and whether the hijab is going to be used to deny girl students their right to education.
• Justice Dhulia represents this viewpoint when he asserts that discipline should not be at the cost of freedom, when he wonders why a girl child wearing a hijab should be a public order problem and declares that ‘reasonable accommodation’ of this practice will be a sign of a mature society. It empathises with the position of girl students who have to overcome greater odds than boys to get an education.

SOURCE: THE HINDU, THE ECONOMIC TIMES, PIB