The Girls Stand Their Ground
Someday we will thank the girls in Kundapur for refusing to submit to a hegemony that we did not recognise, much less fight
The Sanghi SOP by now should be familiar; find a divisive issue; exploit it to create a fissure between majority and minority communities; raise the communal temperature; force the gullible to line up on either side; eviscerate the middle ground; and create a “us vs they” paradigm in which to situate their communal identity politics. The politics in Kundapur over hijab is one more such strategy from the Sanghis, like beef ban or love jihad.
However, there are crucial differences to note. Firstly, the Sangh is targeting youngsters - students - for their polarising campaign, recognising perhaps the limited appeal for their divisive agenda in the better educated South. And second, the effort is aimed at shrinking the social, economic and political space for Muslims, by squeezing the educational opportunities for the most vulnerable among them, young girls.
The evil genius of the move to choke off modernity in the minority community must be recognised clearly. The calculation appears to be that either the most upwardly mobile among Muslims will acquiesce to Sangh demands, or gradually drop out of college. It should be noted that some young girls already wear hijab to college, and change clothes after getting to college, in order to manage the societal pressures on them, even as they embrace education as the way out of their societal traps.
There has been a lot of disinformation on the issue. Firstly, the girls are 18 and above, and not minors. They are adults with a right to dress as they please, subject only to the usual decorum in public spaces. The colleges have a minimal dress code, that allowed girls to wear headscarves under their dupatta. This was changed about a month back through a Govt., order of which little is known. Why and how was the change necessitated? There is no explanation from the Govt. in the public domain. Such orders are not issued in a vacuum and without full consideration of the issues involved.
So clearly, there are people in the background, who were out to foment trouble where none existed. What is sought to be achieved through such an order? As usual the real mischief makers remain hidden. We are left to deal with the consequences. This should change. The entire genesis of the Govt. order, how and why it was initiated, by whom, should be excavated and brought out into the open. The Misprints of the world know this, but deliberately seek to hijack our attention to the obvious non-issues. They conceal what needs to be exposed.
Liberals are being wrong-footed into a deepish contradiction by Sanghi design. Hijab, and dress codes like it, imposed on members by communities, is not something we support. But the Sanghis have adroitly manoeuvred us into a spot where we are seen supporting the hijab.
We need to recognise clearly that we don’t support hijab, or any similar community mandated dress code, but recognise an individual’s right to dress as she pleases, which includes wearing a hijab, if the situation so warrants. We cannot put ourselves in the girls’ shoes to judge if that’s right or wrong. If the girls decide she needs to wear one, for whatever reason, then that’s what we support given the circumstances. For us the centrality and sovereignty of the individual in the polity remains paramount.
The matter is now in court. It is hard to see how an adult girl can be forced to dress as a college decides. It is hard to see how India benefits by shrinking educational opportunities for its most vulnerable youngsters. It is hard to see how Hindus benefit by keeping minorities under-educated, given that education is the most valuable public good.
As usual, only the Sangh parivar benefits politically by harvesting the hate vote. For the Sangh, its political advantage always comes before national interest. It will take a long time to get Hindus to see how they are being led up the garden path, by self-seeking Sanghis in the name of religion.
Will the girls win given the Sanghi strategy of patient malevolence? The girls have a very good case under our present Constitution. They are adults. They have right to dress as they please. The college can at best prescribe some norms for public decorum. The Courts will find it hard to force girls to dress against their wishes. I believe we still have enough decency left in society for us to give the young girls the dignity due to them.
What of the Sanghis who keep dreaming up such divisive issues to further their partisan political agenda? There is no magic wand to wish them away. They and their corrosive poison will remain in our midst for years to come. We will have to fight it, issue to issue, place to place, relying on reason, appealing to the common weal, in the hope that the majority among the Hindus will recognise the self-seeking duplicity of the Sanghis.
Sanghi communalism is a disease that can only be fought off by the Hindus. Epiphany will dawn when Hindus realise that the real target for Sanghi hegemony is not the Muslims, but Hindus themselves. The Sanghis can never hope to dominate Muslims as a priesthood. Muslims are just an excuse to create an “enemy” by “fighting” whom, the Sanghis hope to capitulate gullible Hindus. The goal of the Sangh parivar is unquestioned hegemony over Hindus, not Muslims.
Let us face it. Nothing in our culture and Civilisational ethos prepares us for the sovereignty of the individual. You may be a genius like Eklavya, but your caste overrides your talent. Draupadi is not just a woman, but the property of five brothers, because they must share her to respect the wishes of their unthinking mother. Millions may be led to slaughter to settle a family dispute, as in Mahabharata. Tragically, we celebrate civil wars as our epics, ignoring the real ones that we had to fight starting with Alexander the Great, or the many after him.
Yet, individuals give birth to an Infosys, even TCS, and the many unicorns you see sprouting these days. Societies that learned to empower individuals have prospered. Societies that sought to turn individuals into cogs in a machine floundered. The Sanghis will never renege on caste as an organisational principle. They honestly believe it is caste that sustained Hinduism over the last 2500 years. For them Hinduism and Brahmin hegemony has always been synonymous and will always remain so.
Sanghis will fail because their obsession with hegemony drives out talent and ideas. If you doubt that look at the new VC of JNU. Sanghis will fail because they cannot create the growth and jobs India needs. Sanghis will fail when the majority sees through their self-seeking strategies of dominance.
Someday we will thank the girls in Kundapur for refusing to submit to a hegemony that we did not recognise, much less fight. The girls are taking the first baby steps to clawback a lebensraum for individuals by asserting their natural identity in the face of an invisible hand that has captured the State. Handled calmly, intelligently and through legitimate means of protest, the girls can be the beginning of a return to a normal, liberal democracy.
But for this to happen, we must learn to put ourselves in the shoes of the girl who defied her hecklers with a dignity that is hard to capture in words. Learn from the girls. They have got this right. Much more than us.
Sonali,
02.09.2022.
So well said! What’s happening in Karnataka is not only unprecedented but has brought us on the brink of a Civil war, sadly this is what the BJP/RSS want and they will keep on pushing the Muslims till the situation becomes like a civil war and then they would tell the Hindus, we told you so, you need us to save you. Game over for india that we know 😞
Very nicely summed up whole issue, which actually is non issue but fabricated and created by BJP karnataka Govt. I think Muslim communities have to devise Gandhian ways to tackle this problem. Clear example is Farmer movement etc. These people (Sanghis) should be ignored at all cost to blunt their nefarious design.