Bengaluru: Ten months after the Karnataka High Court held that the “hijab does not form a part of the essential religious practice in the Islam faith”, a comprehensive report by a noted human rights organisation found that Muslim students bore the brunt of a “climate of hate, hostility and misinformation and faced humiliation and harassment from their classmates, faculty and college administration”.
Karnataka chapter of People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) released a report titled, ‘Closing the Gates to Education: Violations of Rights of Muslim Women Students’. The report noted, “Attendance of Muslim students in their examinations considerably declined under such compulsions. Yet, there were many more barriers that were placed on their path to higher education.
These severely affected their mental health as well as their access to learning opportunities.” The PUCL report comes on the heels of an Indian Express report which showed that there was a 50 percent decline in the admission of Muslim students in Udupi’s government Pre-University (PU) colleges. The district was the epicenter of the campaign against hijab in the southern Indian state.
The PUCL report documented the impact of the ban on hijab and cited testimonies of the state’s Muslim women students, who experienced harassment, humiliation and isolation. The report highlighted that the arbitrary and sudden implementation of the ban on hijab before the end of the academic year, especially during examinations, came as a shock to Muslim students across the state.
The report envisioned that Muslim students faced extremely adverse situations. They lost their friends and were getting little or no help from the staff. They even received threatening messages. Muslim students were made to sit in separate rooms.
In Raichur, students told the PUCL team that in a few institutions, Muslim students were made to sit separately in a room where their names and signatures were noted in order to keep track of their attendance records. “This made us feel like we were being deliberately segregated for being Muslims.
Some principals and lecturers even told us that we must either take off our hijab or stay back in the room and ‘think about it’.” Many students got transferred to minority-run institutions because they felt safer and could continue wearing their hijab. In Udupi, a student said, “I feel safer among Muslims now, because nobody came to help when we students were in need.” The PUCL urged the Karnataka government “to respond to the continuing violations of fundamental rights of young Muslim women.”
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