Valson Thampu

The full bench of the Karnataka High Court, the Chief Justice presiding, has upheld the order banning religious attire in Karnataka educational institutions. The court concluded that wearing hijab is not essential to the practice of Islam. Prescribing a uniform is, according to the court, a ‘reasonable restriction’ of religious freedom. It is silent, though, on whether or not it is an ‘essential’ practice for education. Can a restriction be ‘reasonable’, if it is not essential? And can a non-essential educational practice be invoked to outlaw a supposedly non-essential religious practice?
As expected, some of the students ‘affected’ by this verdict have not taken kindly to it. Over fifty of them boycotted the on-going examinations, rather than emerge from their hijabs. Arrangements are underway to appeal to the Supreme Court against the verdict.
The guiding consideration adopted by the high court in this case is the notion of ‘essentiality’. But, what monopolised its attention was the question if wearing hijab is essential to the practice of Islam. The religious question dominated the discourse; and the educational aspect was marginalised. In what follows in this piece, therefore, the attempt is to right this imbalance. We focus largely on the educational aspect.
But, before that, a word on the religious question. How are we to decide whether or not a practice is essential to a religion? Are we to settle this question on the basis of what the scriptures prescribe, or what a community deems, in its context, as essential; not just in words but also in practice? If the scriptural benchmark is over-pressed, very few religious practices in any religion will be left as essential. Arguably, women wearing hijab is a Muslim practice. Now the question is if this convention is essential; essential not to education, but to the practice of Islam. As it happens, there is no bar on wearing hijab in the public domain. The point contested, hence, is if it is permissible as essential in the learning space. Or, is it a distraction there?
It is common knowledge that whether something distracts depends not only on the thing per se, but also on the attitude brought to bear on it. It is possible that something entirely innocuous is perceived as offensive. It is not difficult to improvise an ambience in which offence is manufactured in regard to such practices. For decades, no one was offended at the muezzin’s call emanating from mosques. Then, all of a sudden, it became an unbearable offence; whereas fireworks in religious places -a far greater public nuisance- do not offend, but entertain. The ‘offence’ of a particular thing does not lie entirely in itself, but is also created, or contributed to, by what is external to it. So, it is not enough for the courts to ascertain if wearing hijab is an essential Islamic practice. It is necessary to ask if the perceived offence too is essential, and not a contrived thing masking ulterior intentions. This was not argued.
The second justification for imposing uniforms is that it hides socio-economic inequalities among students. It is hard to convince anyone today that this goal enjoys the sort of sincerity of purpose it used to have. All the more so, when ‘otherness’ is resented and targeted. In such a context, ‘uniforms’ may sub-serve the covert ideological preference for uniformity. The underlying consideration here could well be non-academic. What happens is that students of a particular religious identity are coerced to conform to a norm in regard to which others suffer no comparable constriction. Surely, the imposition of uniforms does not affect all students equally, which exposes the ‘equality alibi’. So, the students of a particular community are made to pay a price that the rest of the student body don’t have to. The burden of uniformity is unequal, and it amounts to, de facto, the pressure to conform, which is contra-academic.
There is an added dimension to the degree of keenness with which this unfairness is felt by the affected students. The court may be convinced that wearing hijab is superfluous to Islam; but the community and homes from which these children come believe otherwise.
Imposition of uniformity is, besides, inimical to education. There is no theory of education that does not insist that diversity, not uniformity, is beneficial in the learning environment. A rainbow is more beautiful, and instructive, than a bow. Not only that. If education is also training for responsible citizenship, it is imperative that ‘unity-in-diversity’ informs the learning milieu. By idolising uniformity, via pressing the essentiality of uniforms, we breed allergy to diversity. This, in turn, legitimises intolerance. Tolerance can be sustained only by a celebration of diversity and plurality.
I too was a student. Experience convinces me that inequality among students is based less on what they wear and more on the attitude they exude and the cliques they form. As a post-graduate student in St. Stephen’s College, I was shunned by my batch-mates for the sole reason that I had a heavy Mallu accent. No uniform could have hidden that ‘condemnable blemish’. Nor did I need one to overcome my demerit. I achieved it with hard work. When the first semester results came, there was shock and disbelief. I proved myself the proverbial turtle, way ahead of the rest. At that level what uniforms, folks? The deification of uniform is, if anything, sillier than the religious essentialisation of hijab.