How is this not a ban on Sikh stu­dents wear­ing tur­bans in ed­u­ca­tional in­sti­tu­tions in the ar­eas served by this Kar­nataka High Court in­terim judge­ment?

Just be­cause the rulers of the day have not de­cided to go af­ter Sikhs, the in­sti­tu­tions haven’t de­cided to ban­ish Sikhs from class­rooms as yet, and the hood­lums aren’t look­ing for Sikhs to ha­rass, does­n’t mean that Sikhs as a com­mu­nity should re­main silent about this di­rect at­tack on Fun­da­men­tal Rights of a sec­tion of cit­i­zens.

The High Court judge­ment amounts to a nega­tion of not just hu­man rights and re­li­gious free­dom, but also the Con­sti­tu­tion­ally granted rights.

The WSN con­demns the in­terim judge­ment, urges the High Court to im­me­di­ately re­store the right of the Mus­lim women sport­ing Hi­jab or not, to be able to pur­sue their stud­ies with­out be­ing ha­rassed by hood­lums or self-ap­pointed vig­i­lante force that de­rives its strength from within the regime and its ide­o­log­i­cal pa­trons.

We, at the WSN, are dou­bly dis­ap­pointed at the lack of ur­gency dis­played by the Supreme Court, which, on Thurs­day, Feb 11, said: ‘Don’t spread these things to larger lev­els’, and de­clined an ur­gent hear­ing to a plea against the Kar­nataka High Court’s Hi­jab or­der.

The law must side with the vic­tims, not the hood­lums.

Manu Se­bas­t­ian, the Man­ag­ing Ed­i­tor of LiveLaw, in a scathing ed­i­to­r­ial note has crit­i­cised the Kar­nataka High Court or­der as an “In­terim Sus­pen­sion Of Fun­da­men­tal Rights: Shock­ing Or­der Of Kar­nataka HC In Hi­jab Case.

He has fur­ther pointed out that the Ker­ala HC judg­ment in Amna Bint Basheer v CBSE  held hi­jab as a manda­tory prac­tice and the Madras HC judg­ment in Aj­mal Khan vs ECI,  held “It is thus, seen from the re­ported ma­te­r­ial that there is al­most una­nim­ity amongst Mus­lim schol­ars that pur­dah is not es­sen­tial but cov­er­ing of head by scarf is oblig­a­tory”.

Those keen on un­der­stand­ing the full ar­gu­ment, lis­ten to this full record­ing of the High Court of Kar­nataka pro­ceed­ings of CH-I, dated 10 Feb­ru­ary 2022. Those who are short of time, may lis­ten to the last 5 min­utes of the court hear­ing.

Lord­ships! They have a right to their hi­jab, you need to hide your face be­hind a veil!

(For ref­er­ence, please see the Kar­nataka High Court’s judg­ment in Hi­jab row – Writ Pe­ti­tion 2347/​2022; con­nected cases: WP NO. 2146/​2022, WP NO. 2880/​2022, WP NO.3038/​2022 AND WP NO.3044/​2022)  dated Feb 10, 2022, in the case wherein cer­tain ed­u­ca­tional in­sti­tu­tions have in­sisted that no girl stu­dent shall wear the hi­jab (head­scarf) whilst in the class­rooms.)