Although, using women’s bodies to attack the minority is not new
Udupi, a small town in the southern state of Karnataka, India, is known for
its popular cuisine and temple tourism. In the past week, though, the city
has become a flashpoint of religious hostility against the Muslim
minorities thanks to a recent injunction in a school that barred women
students who wore a hijab from entering. When the order first came almost a
fortnight ago, a group of students staged a sit-in outside their campuses
while the authorities refused to budge. But last week, the issue gained
momentum when a viral video of a veiled Muslim girl, Muskan Khan, being
heckled by saffron mobs brought global attention to the matter. Shortly,
condemnations from international quarters followed.
Domestically, this matter has now reached a few other states proclaiming
(or being on the verge of doing so) similar orders.
Historically, the debate around Muslim women’s clothing first became a
topic of global discourse in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks. As
Lila Abu-Lughod writes in her book,
Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, during this period, ‘the images of oppressed Muslim women became
connected to a mission to rescue them from their cultures.’
Global Islamophobia and secular peculiarities
Muslim women wear a variety of scarves or veils ranging from full-face
covers (niqabs) to headscarves (hijab). Several countries in the European
Union have banned the full-face covering, most recent examples being
Belgium and Switzerland, while the first country to bring in such a ban was
France in 2011. Clearly, the urge to regulate Muslim women’s clothing is a
global trend, and as this piece will demonstrate, it is a concerted effort
by state authorities to perpetuate Islamophobia. The hardened stance of
France particularly – articulated often by its President – on this matter
offers a model and inspiration to several leaders who wish to emulate this
ban. The authorities have provided several reasons ranging from security
threats to the dampening of secularism by religious symbols in public
spaces.
In her seminal book
The Politics of the Veil, gender studies scholar Joan Wallach Scott asks the fundamental question:
Why is it that out of several religious symbols present in public spaces,
only Muslim women’s status and clothes require ‘special remedial action’.
She warns us against responding to these questions in polarities such as a
battle between tradition and modernity or an inevitable clash of
civilisations. Scott locates this policy in France's contentious
relationship with its Muslim subjects, many of whom have origins in
erstwhile colonies. For other European nations, she suggests that this
debate offers them ‘a defense of the European nation-state as they grapple
with concerns about national sovereignty while being members of the
European Union’. Within these political anxieties, it is easy to identify a
threat in Muslims and to thrust the burden of performing the peculiarities
of country-specific secularism on Muslim women and their disrobing.
Yet, irrespective of what the women affected by the matter have to say,
this discussion is hijacked entirely by a polarising discourse that frames
it in terms of tradition (read bad, archaic and therefore not nationally
assimilated) vs modernity (read default: White). The white or western
culture of women’s bodies on display is strictly the norm. Everything else,
including any attempt at modesty, is an exception, therefore wrong and
worthy of regulation. As suggested by Abu-Lughod, this is done by
presenting ‘Muslims as a special and threatening culture— the most
homogenised and the most troubling of the rest. In this new common sense,
Muslim women symbolise just how alien this culture is.’
Using women’s bodies as sites where so many of these existential anxieties
of nation-states can play out allows states to attack minority populations
and disarm them of their rights in the name of saving them.
The curious case of Indian secularism
Article 25 of the Indian constitution guarantees freedom of religion to all
individuals. Yet, when the hijab ban matter reached the state high court,
it ordered maintenance of the status quo, i.e. asking the girl students to
comply with school orders. Several students came forward saying that this
order asked them to suspend their faith temporarily. In the last few days,
discourse in the media has been focused on identifying whether the hijab
amounts to ‘essential religious practice’ or not. Anybody worth their salt
has jumped into the debate, especially on social media, proclaiming that
these women are victims of patriarchy who are fussing over a piece of
cloth. In trivialising this discussion by focusing on the nature of this
garment, we disregard the women's agency not just to wear what they want
but also their choice to abide by faith. As latest videos have shown,
actively asking women to take off their garments in a public space strips
them of dignity and agency in a single moment, thereby not just violating
but simply snatching their basic human rights to just be.
India's current right-wing, ultra-nationalist regime has created an
environment that actively penalises the Muslim identity. Since 2014, a
spate of violent hate crimes and lynchings in the name of cow protection
and mass gatherings calling for a genocide of minorities have been
organised with unabashed impunity. In this context, the state-sanctioned
violence against Muslims has acquired a gendered angle wherein Muslim women
are being saved through what the government proclaims are benign
injunctions (first through a law that criminalised a form of Islamic
divorce and now this hijab ban) from their male counterparts who are being
subjected to other specific brutalities. The Indian Muslim man is a savage,
the Indian Muslim woman is a passive, hapless victim, and a right-wing
government that thrives on majoritarianism is their saviour. Together, they
are the prongs of a secular republic.
In creating a narrative that calls these women to choose between their
faith and education, the state wishes to establish that the two are
mutually exclusive and fundamentally incompatible. The trick is borrowed
from a global playbook but has a local twang to make it palatable. Such a
ban violates the students’ right to practice their religion and even
hinders their right to education. But as responsible citizens in a
globalised world, one must ponder why right-wing governments across nations
are drawing from the same playbook and why a woman is wearing a headscarf
as its leitmotif?
As the world’s largest democracy, India prides itself on being distinct
from China as the two countries house more than a third of the world’s
population. Since Independence, the form of democracy within the country
has evolved based on political circumstances to the form today, which
political scientist Christopher Jaffrelot classifies as an ethnic
democracy. He states that while this term came to social sciences from the
Israeli model of the “Jewish state,” in India, it is characterised by the
‘promotion of a Hindu definition of the nation in opposition to the
secularism enshrined in the 1950 Constitution’. By using the law to create
scenarios that penalise the practice of faith, there is an attempt to
criminalise the bare state of being a minority. The state will not actively
kill you but will strip you of indignity (by disrobing if you are a woman
and by vigilante violence if you are a man), a blatant and violent
violation of the right to life firmly enshrined in the Constitution. If
global Islamophobia had an epochal moment rooted in imperialism in 9/11,
then the present moment is a turning point in perpetuating Islamophobia
through majoritarianism.
Either way does not bode well for a world that should have thrived instead
in cross-cultural flows but is stuck instead in evolving forms of divisive
politics being played out on women's bodies.