https://www.dhakatribune.com/foreign-affairs/2022/02/24/dhaka-seeks-delhis-cooperation-to-resolve-outstanding-issues
We are well into the third decade of the 21st century, but much of India is still stuck looking backwards in yet another medievalist orgy of navel-gazing about women’s clothing (and more specifically the hijab). In what is not at all coincidentally election season in giant Uttar Pradesh - whose easily polarized population of over 200 million is the key to national power – ugly incidents have proliferated in different parts of the country. Earlier this week, for just one example, the state-owned UCO Bank in Begusarai district of Bihar peremptorily refused to release cash unless a customer lifted her veil, and only relented after her father’s protests. Previous incidents were even more troubling and traumatic, as widely circulated videos from Karnataka showed young girls as well as some of their teachers being forced to take off head coverings in order to enter school. Speaking for very many Indians, the award-winning journalist Rohini Mohan tweeted that “asking women who are used to wearing a hijab or burkha to take it off, overnight, and that too on the street, is like asking a woman to take her top or dupatta off, or pull her sari pallu down. This is not law & order, this is humiliation at best, sexual harassment at worst.” Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s latest *Indian* *Express* column surveys the situation with characteristic incisiveness: “plain truths ought to be evident to anyone with an iota of decency. The spectacle of humiliating students and teachers by asking them to remove the hijab is a new level of public moral cretinism. If that spectacle did not shock you, then you are unlikely to be moved by any moral consideration.” Mehta’s unequivocal analysis is “the motivating principle behind the call to remove the hijab is not progressive equal rights for all. It had four functions: An instrument by which to browbeat minorities and erase Muslim cultural presence in the public sphere; to continue and create a sense of dread and fear; to trap self-described progressives into a politics of “ifs and buts”; and to foment more violence.” Taking the classical liberal stance, which also happens to be the only morally defensible position, Mehta says “what the meaning of hijab is to people who wear it is none of my business; it is not for me to judge…But the important thing from a public point of view is that it does not, on its own, interfere with any project of civic empowerment: It does not interfere with education, holding a job, voting, participating in public life, or achieving anything in life. To, therefore, use it as a pretext for disqualifying someone from teaching or going to college is a travesty.” Argues Mehta, “the moral gravity of the moment is that we pretend as if the usual conventions of a healthy democracy are working: That people are making moral arguments in good faith, that disagreements can be negotiated, that the ruling dispensation has no investment in violence and that the courts are here to do constitutional justice.” In this way, “the BJP has succeeded in its aims of constructing the Muslim as a figure of threat. It has also succeeded in fomenting violence and will now play the “Hindus are victim” card…This debate is not about competing visions of secularism. It is about finding every pretext to institutionalise state sponsored cruelty.” Earlier this month when antics in Karnataka were reaching crescendo, I was struck by another angle taken by Annie Zaidi, the award-winning author whose latest book is *City of Incident: A Novel in Twelve Parts.*Zaidi began an impassioned thread of posts on Twitter with this admission: “Every day last week, I have fought the nausea of watching girls being bullied, pushed into a corner where they must choose between being treated as humans participating decently in society (school) in the short term, and being treated as equal humans, being who they are (Muslim).” She said that “what we are seeing is a form of apartheid via policy. It may not be racial apartheid but it certainly is discriminatory to shut out any population based on their identity. As someone said, it is an extension of the "pollution" via touch or the shadow-of-the-other principle.” I emailed Zaidi to ask for elaboration, and she wrote back that “the hijab 'controversy' cannot be seen in isolation in the Indian context. There have been similar attempts to control Muslim women's attire in the west too, but there are crucial differences. The major difference is political context.” She explained: “There have been assaults upon every aspect of Muslim identity over the last decade. In our public discourse, we have arguments about beef and whether the life of a human being is less important than that of a cow. Entire towns are being forced to adopt vegetarianism in the name of religion. Communal 'riots' have a longer history, we have several reports that point to an institutional bias problem. More Muslims die and lose property and livelihoods during riots, and yet, more Muslims are punished as instigators or perpetrators. What does law mean when everybody is aware that there is a bias problem, and it has not been addressed at all over the decades?” Zaidi told me, “I don't wear a headscarf, so I don't get slotted 'Muslim' so easily, but I sometimes wear a knitted scarf for warmth, of the type worn by women in small towns in India. I notice that it does change some people's behaviour [although] it doesn't hurt much since I am able to analyze those reactions, and also because that scarf is not a part of my identity, but it has made me more sensitive to how strangers' social behaviour impacts a person's mood and sense of well-being.” The bottom line, says Zaidi, is “if someone dresses a bit different, not having people meet their eyes can feel like a rejection. It's like Gulzar says, *dil to bachcha hai ji.* There's a child inside all of us, and that child is easily hurt.”