One of my close friends, a Sanskrit scholar and an expositor of the Paninian school of grammar, besides donning many hats, ruefully said that any endeavour to promote Sanskrit gets suspect in India because of the hoary association in popular perception of the Sangh Parivar being the sole upholder of the Sanskrit language and literature and the encompassing religious traditions.

Much the same way, the controversy around hijab in Karnataka is fanning around a trope of the dress being regressive and an anathema to the cause of empowerment of women, which looks suspect because the animus of the ruling dispensation draws its strength not out of any progressive idea but of an Islamophobia and of an insidious need for polarization.

The controversy that erupted in Karnataka over the wearing of hijab by a few girl students of Udupi Women’s Pre-University college and the consequent repercussions can be compared to an incident in the Parisian suburb of Creil in the autumn of 1989 when two pupils came to class wearing Muslim scarves.

The incident ~ promptly hijacked and politicized by all sides ~ sparked a national debate about religious neutrality in republican schools. And the range of issues that came out of a hotly contested churn included, among other things, the dwindling status of public education in a fragmented society, the status of women in minority cultures, the problematic legitimacy of traditional norms of authority and social integration, the protracted liquidation of the colonial legacy, the politicization of race and immigration, the seemingly difficult integration of North African immigrants, fears about a ‘conflict of civilizations’ pitting the West against Islamic fundamentalism, and a sense of diffuse threat to French national identity.

Besides France, the Shabina Begum legal case in the UK, involving a pupil who sought to defend her right to wear the jilbab in her state school and the public comments made by Labour politician Jack Straw against the face covering of Muslim women in October 2006, are the two particularly well-publicized controversies that are relevant here because these very public disputes and hostility to the niqab in the popular right-wing press notwithstanding, there has been no serious move to regulate face covering.

The guidelines that followed was that toleration should be the rule (on the grounds of multicultural inclusion), except where the fulfilment of duty is inhibited or security is infringed. The religious jingoism among students might make one despair over how religion is used as a divisive tool in lieu of education being used as a unifying force, which had been so far the case. How many of us did actually bother about the religion of our school, college and university mates? What is even sadder is that the young students donning saffron stoles battling with students defending hijabs have even more pressing problems other than fighting with one another, for example, the rising unemployment staring at their face.

How can a distinction be made among Hindu students in bindis or red wrist chords, or in mangalsutras signalling married status for some of them, Sikh students with their turban or kada, or Muslim women with a veil or without, or those sporting Jewish yarmulkes, crosses on chains and skullcaps on heads unless one dispensation prizes a religious symbol over another? So, while our jurists deliberate on the essential religious practices (ERP) doctrine, perhaps a case may be made to buttress the need to recognize the interdependence of religion and secularism in our democracy too.

If it is legit for some girls in Udupi college to insist on putting on a hijab, Aroosa Parvaiz who topped this year’s 10+2 board exams from J&K choosing not to wear one is legit too. Hijab is a dress in which national and liberal identities overlap, exposing the paradox that while it may be an affront to liberal values, its suppression is equally illiberal. The shallowness of the debate risks running into a rather illiberal liberalism. Saffron is very much considered a colour of renunciation in keeping with the holiest Hindu traditions, which are also millennial. But now the usurpation of saffron has also made it a colour with which one associates the Hindu Right, as red with the Communists, or green with the Islamists though the connections are as disparate as they are misleading.

In a multitude of contexts, a hijab can be seen either as an erotic or as a romantic symbol, as much as a symbol of oppression or a sign of piety, modesty, or purity ~ the religious, sexual, social, and political significance of which is millennial. Now the assembly-line production of saffron stoles, presented almost as a symbol of competitive bigotry, and as a counterfoil of hijab is both politically mischievous and dangerous. Hindu sadhus of some denominations do wear saffron robes but just because both Swami Vivekananda was and Yogi Adiyanath is clad in saffron, they can’t be on the same page barely on account of the symbolic value of the colour. Rituals are recurrent standardized deeds within the framework of the hermeneutics of meaning.

A symbol, in contrast to a sign, is something that refers to something else; it bears extrinsic values. Without an appreciation of the social function a symbol plays in its own milieu ~ its role in the community, the values and practices that it connotes, the history and traditions that it evokes when used, one might be misled. In 1925, Reza Shah established the Pahlavi dynasty. The westernized monarch with a flair for drastic and unorthodox measures to modernize the country banned the wearing of hijab for women and traditional Eastern garb for men in 1936. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 ended the establishment of the monarchy in Iran and replaced it with an Islamic republic. On 21 February 1994, a gesticulating woman in full view of the crowd in a public square in Tehran, removed her government-mandated veil and full coat, poured gasoline on her body and lit herself on fire. To the horrified crowd watching her. she committed a slow, painful suicide, while screaming, “Death to tyranny! Long live freedom!”, in a last, desperate attempt to make the world aware of the slavelike conditions of women living in Iran.

Swinging between progress and regress, Iran had suffered a great deal of conflict and confusion caused by the impact of Western views on the hijab in the 19th century which is evident from the range of seminarian thinking in Iran on the controversial topic of the hijab. Representative thinkers such as Murtaza Mutahhari held veiling to be compulsory, Ahmad Qabil argued for the desirability of the hijab, while Muhsin Kadivar considered it neither necessary nor desirable. The framework known as ‘new religious thinking’ among the seminarians might help to appreciate how and why the young generation of scholars have offered divergent judgements about the hijab. For some years now, in a number of European countries, hijab-related controversies have increasingly become the catalysts for a wider questioning of the ideals of pluralism and multiculturalism.

In her book The Politics of the Veil by Joan Wallach Scott (2007) discovered a disturbing trend among the opponents of the veil in France ~ from conservative politicians to feminist intellectuals ~ railing against the “intolerance”, “backwardness,” and “authoritarian” nature of global Islam ~ toward “absolutist secularism” and an uncompromisingly hostile stance toward cultural difference. The paradoxes of religion and secularism that have been revealed by the French government’s prohibition of the headscarf ~ also referred to as veil ~ in school betrayed a surprising degree of chauvinism in the political ideals of French universalism; of intolerance in France’s lauded defence of “abstract individualism” as the basis for citizenship; and of patriarchal authority in certain French feminists’ insistence that any wearing of the “veil” is inherently oppressive and degrading of females.

So fraught is the debate is that it is not uncommon to discover opponents of the ban as well as defenders of the headscarves who, through quoted testimony, had revealed why a headscarf or a veil is a symbol of survival and social well-being, why younger women in the poorest sections of major French cities, condemned to study in woefully underfunded schools, increasingly take to the veil “to negotiate their gender, spiritual, and political identities” and why some drape themselves in adherence to their roots, family and cultural traditions, or to assert individual dignity, or when pushed, to mark religious territoriality and entitlement.

Even if we accept for the sake of the argument that the hijab is an expression of gender inequality, what if women voluntarily choose to wear the symbol of their sexual submission? So finally, it’s a question of choice. In France, according to a piece of 1905 law, no religion may be supported by the state, either financially or politically. Drawing upon that, the Act of 2004 prohibits the display of any religious and political signs in both primary and secondary schools but not for universities. In France, the principle of laïcité (secularism) applies to all public institutions and services (including teachers) as well as to courts.

In Turkey, although the majority of citizens are Muslim, the headscarf was banned because modern Turkey followed the historical model of France proclaiming a strict form of secularism. But India’s secularism, as we know, is different. Gandhi intuited a simple but critical logic: people live by a clutch of beliefs irrespective of whether they are rooted in atheism, secularism, or spiritualism, and these need to be accommodated in a secular polity. Gandhi disavowed the separation of religion from state as they saw, to infer that in India, religion is extremely powerful in the social, cultural, and political order.

Perhaps that might be a reason why Nehruvian secularism failed on the ground. It is also the reason why we cannot draw upon the instances of France and Turkey. When we see the prime minister of a secular country inaugurating a temple corridor in a grand scale or spending public money performing lavish pujas and Hindu rituals and ensuring they are telecast to every home, or a candidate seeking votes on the ground of religion, we understand the power of religion.

The Representation of the People Act provides that appeals made on the grounds of religion to gather votes would be deemed to be a corrupt practice and would disqualify a candidate but this happens as a rule in all our elections. All political parties thrived on religion to gather votes. Until we can separate state from religion, we cannot separate students on the basis of religious symbols.

(The writer is a Kolkata-based commentator on politics, development and cultural issues)