Hijab has become a big issue because, more than anti-BJP leaders, intellectuals and celebrities have started supporting it.
Senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader Manjinder Singh Sirsa has hit the nail on the head by saying that the Congress is wrongly equating hijab with Sikhs’ turban.
“Glaring Facts: Sr Adv Devadatt Kamat, who appeared in Karnataka HC to support Hijab appointed as chairman of Congress legal coordination committee for the UP election. Advocate Ravi Kumar Verma, petitioner’s lawyer who presented whataboutery on Turban, is a Congress beneficiary and was appointed Adv General by state Cong Govt. Senior Congress leader Sunil Jhakhar did a press conference and linked Hijab with Turban directly tried to involve SGPC,” Sirsa tweeted.
While it is true that Sirsa’s remarks are aimed at deriving political mileage, the points he makes are indeed relevant: “Congress involved their favourite celebrities who equalled Hijab and Turban. Congress gameplan to alienate Sikhs from Indian mainstream is clear.” The reference was to the views of actress Sonam Kapoor that “if turban can be a choice, why not a hijab?”
Evidently, the pro-hijab folks are not aware of the essential practices doctrine that the Supreme Court conceived way back in 1954 and applied it on more than one occasion. The doctrine says, “A religion may not only lay down a code of ethical rules for its followers to accept, it might prescribe rituals and observances, ceremonies and modes of worship which are regarded as integral parts of religion, and these forms and observances might extend even to matters of food and dress.” In other words, some rituals and observances are essential or integral parts of religion and others are not; the judiciary determines what is essential and what is not—and rightly so. This is the reason that Sikh soldiers are allowed to grow beards and wear turbans, because without a beard and turban a Sikh won’t be a proper Sikh. A Hindu soldier, on the other hand, is not allowed to apply tika on his forehead while on duty, for he doesn’t lose his faith without a tika. Hijab has become a big issue because, more than anti-BJP leaders, intellectuals and celebrities have started supporting it. They refuse to acknowledge the fact that, on the pretext of minority rights, jihadist forces are involved in fomenting trouble and communalizing the situation in Karnataka.
The Indian Express reported on 5 February: “In the communally polarised Udupi district of coastal Karnataka, protests by some girl students from the Muslim community for the right to wear a hijab to classes at Government Pre-University College is being seen by many in the region as part of the struggle for political ascendancy by Campus Front of India (CFI), the students’ wing of Popular Front of India, a Muslim social organisation”.
The report went on to add, “While both the protesting students and CFI have denied any larger political conspiracy behind the stir, political leaders in Udupi, including the local BJP MLA and leaders of Muslim organisations, see a link between the controversy and the growing political heft of Social Democratic Party of India (SDPI) in the region.”
The PFI is much more than “a Muslim social organisation”; it is actually a fundamentalist outfit whose political wing is the SDPI. It is a measure of its growing influence that more and more women are getting influenced and starting to wear hijab, burqa, etc. Even young and middle-aged women who never wore hijab earlier are making it mandatory for their daughters.
Typically, intellectuals are acting as the B-team of the mullahs. But then intellectuals have always supported such trends, whether it was socialism and communism when the Soviet Union was alive or jihad today. Lenin coined an interesting term, “useful idiots”, for the Left-leaning and liberal intellectuals who blindly and unquestioningly accepted Leftist lies.
Walter Duranty figured very high in the list of useful idiots. A star reporter with the New York Times, Duranty reported from the Soviet Union when the murderous regimes of Lenin and Stalin were killing people in millions. Duranty wrote rosy accounts from the Soviet Union when collectivization and purges were eliminating millions. Even when 25,000 Ukrainian peasants were dying every day, Duranty refused to expose the barbarity of communism. Having accepted the ends-justify-the-means argument, he even condoned communist in Russia by saying, “You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.” On this a commentator, Mark Y. Herring, remarked, “Those ‘eggs’ were the heads of men, women and children and those ‘few’ were tens of millions.” Communism declined, but not the enthusiasm of useful idiots to serve evil; now they shower their affection on all manner of Muslim fundamentalists. So, contemporary liberals have no compunctions in becoming the allies of jihadist groups like PFI and SDPI. On top of that, they have the cheek to claim that hijab is about freedom of religion and the right to education. It hasn’t occurred to any liberal that the freedom to become submissive to a restrictive dress code can be called freedom only in an Orwellian manner.
Besides, the purpose of education is widening of knowledge base, enhancement of cerebral faculties, and furthering moral progress; restrictive attire is the antithesis of all three. But liberals intend to square the circle.