#158 Avoiding The Usual Distractions

India Policy Watch #1: On Hijab And Freedom Insights on burning policy issues in India — RSJ The hijab row roiling colleges in the Udupi district of Karnataka reached the courts this week. A full bench of the Karnataka High Court ruled on Thursday that all students are restrained from wearing clothes with religious symbolism within classrooms in institutions that have a prescribed dress code or uniform. The bench adjourned the hearing to Monday while requesting the state government to reopen the educational institutions. The government meanwhile declared holidays till Feb 16 to avoid the burden of opening up the colleges in the interim. The order has some interesting passages including this: “It hardly needs to be mentioned that ours is a country of plural cultures, religions, and languages. Being a secular State, it does not identify itself with any religion as its own. Every citizen has the right to profess and practice any faith of choice is true. However, such a right not being absolute is susceptible to reasonable restrictions as provided by the Constitution of India. Whether wearing of hijab in the classroom is part of the essential religious practice of Islam in the light of constitutional guarantees, needs a deeper examination.” This is an old conflict from the time of enlightenment when reason, empiricism and individual liberty were placed on the pedestal by the leading thinkers of the time. Industrialisation, the weakening of traditional social structures because of population shifts to urban centres, and the loosening of the grip of religion in everyday lives meant the questions about the place of religion in civil society and the relation between church and state animated the political and social discourse. Over time though doubts emerged about the benefits of such progressivism. The anxiety over losing a sense of community, the guilt of turning away from one’s religion and a kind of longing for a past that was precious but now lost sowed the roots of cultural conservatism as we know it today. In less diverse societies than India, this battle is framed as that between individual freedom and choice versus the inner order and stability that a society draws from its legacy and culture collectively. This itself has been fraught as we have seen in the backlash against liberalism over the last decade. Things get more complicated in India. There’s the individual freedom to choose and the society that has to contend with that freedom and its impact on it way of life. And then there’s also the community, often in minority, to which the individual belongs which might privilege its desire to conserve its values over both the individual and the society. This is a three-way problem. Should we see the girls wanting to wear hijab in educational institutions as exercising their freedom? Before we even get to whether this freedom has to be circumscribed in certain scenarios like the High Court has opined, should we ask whether we are convinced this choice of hijab is an individual choice? Some of you may ask does that matter. The girl students are themselves saying it is what they want to wear. Who are we to object? But is that choice so obviously individual? Or, is it the choice of another collective, the religious community, that’s imposing it covertly through its own code that’s coercive? Then, in the name of supporting the individual choice of wearing hijab, are we subjugating the choices of many other girls in future who might be coerced into wearing hijab were this battle won by these girls? Is the individual freedom a moral absolute in all circumstances? Or, does this kind of freedom that might mean absence of choice for other girls in choosing not to wear hijab in future that liberals should get behind in force? Our founders in their debates at the constituent assembly contended with these three forces - the primacy of the individual on the back of which the liberal constitution was being written, the communal identity of people that gave their lives meaning and structure over centuries and couldn’t be wished away, and the need for a centripetal force of legal and social system that drew the society closer together. Some kind of a balance was attempted and written into the constitution as fundamental rights. But a lot was left to the leaders and the people to find for themselves through practice, customs and traditions which would differ across regions and communities. It was acknowledged that people will have to be trusted to follow what’s acceptable and what has to be changed in their social realms without imposing a strict rule of law over it. This is why it is futile to argue over cultural issues through the lens of liberty enshrined in the constitution. There are enough exceptions all around us for every stripe of argument to be made for and against it. This is what we see in the hijab row. There are arguments about the individual choice of young Muslim girls and their rights over their bodies. There is a case made about how religious symbols of Sikhs are allowed within educational institutions or how easily we accept the Hindu festivals of Ganesh Puja or Saraswati Puja. And there’s the point made about keeping educational institutions free from overt religious symbolism else we set off on a slippery slope. There’s no easy or right answer. The only answer to this is by asking what was the custom in these schools and colleges before the row started. And to revert to the status quo. Because things only get worse when trying to ‘solve’ such issues. Of course, any attempt to solve this must also be seen in conjunction with the politics that’s dominant in society now. It is difficult to argue on the principle of keeping religious symbolism away from the matters of the state when you have an almost daily spectacle of political leaders flaunting visible religious symbols of the majority denomination deliberately. That’s again a deviation from the status quo that threatens a fragile equilibrium we have maintained since independence. But maybe that’s the intent all along. To keep stirring the pot of communal disharmony to distract us. It isn’t so much about shaking things up and awakening the spirit that brings us together. That’s the ruse used to explain our relative underperformance. In essence, this is that old colonial game to use culture and religion to divide us in a new garb. In his famous essay, Culture and Anarchy (1869), cultural conservative, Matthew Arnold, made two key points about culture that I thought will be useful to bring here. It clarifies why culture is important to claim for social order and what kind of customs take us further in that pursuit of harmony and inner stability. It is a useful test to apply when we claim cultural practices as a manifestation of freedom of choice. Arnold writes: “The whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world; and through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically. This, and this alone, is the scope of the following essay. And the culture we recommend is, above all, an inward operation.” Further, he writes: “Thus, in our eyes, the very framework and exterior order of the State, whoever may administer the State, is sacred; and culture is the most resolute enemy of anarchy, because of the great hopes and designs for the State which culture teaches us to nourish. But as, believing in right reason, and having faith in the progress of humanity towards perfection, and ever labouring for this end, we grow to have clearer sight of the ideas of right reason, a… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit publicpolicy.substack.com