The distinction between the hijab and the ghoonghat

On Monday, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar pulled down a Muslim physician’s hijab resulting in an uproar. Opposition leaders from the Congress criticised Kumar whereas some politicians from the Bharatiya Janata Party have defended him. Kumar’s Janata Dal (United) is a part of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance on the Centre and within the state.

A BJP politician instantly made a comparability with Ashok Gehlot of the Congress who had executed the identical with a Hindu girl’s ghoonghat a couple of years in the past.

It is true that each the Islamic veil in all its kinds and the Hindu ghoonghat are patriarchal instruments with the only operate of making submissive girls. There is one distinction although: not like the Islamic veil, the ghoonghat is politically benign. The ghoonghat is deemed socially oppressive, and rightly so. But the hijab and the burqa are usually not solely seen as socially oppressive but in addition a part of some diabolical Islamic stratagy that may, sooner or later, overthrow Hindu civilisation.

If there’s pity for the Hindu girl within the ghoonghat, there’s contempt for the Muslim girl in burqa or hijab.

It is that this distinction that makes the Gehlot instance misleading. In 2019, when Gehlot set out onhis anti-ghoonghat marketing campaign, he had focused the follow itself. The BJP, nonetheless, targets the very id of the Muslim: what they put on, what they eat, the place they stay, whom they marry, every part begets suspicion.

When id is focused, the precise offender – patriarchy – will get brushed underneath the carpet.

A few years in the past throughout analysis for my guide on purdah, I had met a number of Hindu girls in cities in Rajasthan. Many had voiced their protest in opposition to the ghoonghat. In a gorgeous Hindi poem, Mamta Jaitley, an activist from Jaipur, lamented how late she was to understand that “the purdah you hurled over my face obscured my thoughts too… made me see issues as you needed me to see, hear issues as you needed me to listen to”.

For the Muslim girl, even voicing an opinion, not to mention protest, isn’t as easy. In the shadow of Hindutva, she encounters a a lot deeper wrestle than her ghoonghat–clad counterpart. She isn’t dealing merely with a social norm or non secular follow inside her group, however a political leviathan that seeks to codify prejudice in opposition to the whole group.

Yes, patriarchy have to be resisted. But when girls’s reforms are steeped in malicious intent, they trigger extra hurt to the very girls they search to assist. For instance, the Indian authorities’s ban on triple talaq solely added to the woes of Muslim girls. Muslim males who might now not divorce their spouse rapidly started to desert them. These girls might neither ask for upkeep nor remarry.

When costume codes are attacked, no matter how patriarchal they’re, usually girls willingly bypass their very own subordination and undertake seen symbols that bind them to a collective id. The hijab and the burqa are the right visible alerts of Muslim solidarity and belonging. I met Muslim girls in varied cities who had taken up some or the opposite type of the Islamic veil to sign defiance in opposition to prejudice, though they acknowledged the patriarchal objective of hijab.

A younger abaya-clad forensic sciences pupil I met in Mangaluru final 12 months had adeptly defined the catch-22: “If I abandon the veil, I please the federal government (which I might by no means do); if I undertake the veil, I abide by my faith but in addition lose part of myself, my very own id.”

Besides, patriarchy as an establishment is previous. Very previous. Its origins date again 300,000 years. The follow of veiling itself is 4,000 years previous. One can not merely will away deeply-embedded practices by means of sudden expurgations: change has to come back from inside society. Veiling is a part of the system of purdah (seclusion), a system so normalised that even Mohandas Gandhi, as a younger married man, would refuse to permit his spouse, Kasturba, to go anyplace with out his permission.

He had been made a jealous husband by the thought, “If I ought to be pledged to be trustworthy to my spouse, she additionally ought to be pledged to be trustworthy to me” – a fallibility he later regretted. So, at a public tackle in Fatehpur in 1947, when he stated, “True purdah ought to be of the center. What is the worth of the outer veil?”, it’s probably that his phrases ordained a deal with the inequality of sexes somewhat than only a sanction in opposition to a costume code.

Whether a lady wears a veil out of coercion, which is quite common, or willingly adopts it in political protest or piety, paternalistic bans and assaults are prone to fail. Just as paternalistic mandates that make hijab obligatory have failed – as in Iran. The drawback is that the lady in whose title bans and abstruse verdicts are handed is universally ignored.

Unless there’s a political ideology concentrating on a complete group of individuals, resulting in defiance, mainstream training can considerably assist in breaking dangerous practices. Most Muslim girls I met in India who had rejected the veil had been educated and financially impartial. But forcing college students to take away their veils stops this progress halfway.

Many women and girls who went to highschool and faculty in Karnataka of their hijab dropped out when pressured to take away it. The French hijab ban in 2004, too, led to elevated perceptions of discrimination, which hindered Muslim women from ending college.

Attacks on the hijab will probably worsen the standing of Muslim girls as a result of the one possibility that would depart for a lot of is non secular training. It is extra accessible, much less restrictive – and patriarchal. Is that the target?

Raheel Dhattiwala is a sociologist.