ISLAMABAD: Last week, a state government in southern India quietly lifted a ban that had spent four years doing what its architects intended: keeping Muslim girls out of school.
The ban was on the hijab. It was imposed in 2022 in Karnataka, a state of 67 million people, by the Bharatiya Janata Party. The BJP is India's governing Hindu nationalist party, in power nationally since 2014 under Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
It lost Karnataka in 2023 state elections. The party that replaced it, the Indian National Congress, revoked the ban on May 13. Schools may now permit headscarves, Sikh turbans, and Hindu sacred threads alongside uniforms, as reported by The Hindu.
The mechanics of the original ban reveal how deliberately it was constructed. In late 2021, Muslim women students at a government college were suddenly barred from classrooms for wearing headscarves. The practice had been accepted for years without incident, per the IIUM Law Journal.
Groups of Hindu nationalist students then showed up in saffron-colored scarves. Saffron is the symbolic color of BJP-aligned nationalism in India. The government did not act against those students, it acted against the Muslim girls.
The order it issued described the headscarf as a threat to "equality and public order," as reported by Muslim News UK. Legal scholars writing in the International Journal of Law in Context called it what it was: indirect discrimination, dressed in the language of neutral policy.
The girls paid the price. Many were turned away from national board examinations. Many lost full academic years. The People's Union for Civil Liberties, an Indian civil rights organization, documented the damage in detail.
Then came February 10, 2022, and a moment that traveled around the world. A 19-year-old student named Muskan Khan arrived at her college to submit an assignment. A crowd of men in saffron scarves surrounded her. They followed her across campus, chanting political slogans.
She did not run.
She turned and chanted back, alone, until staff pulled her to safety, per the Times of India. CNN called her "a symbol of resistance."
Within days, fabricated social media posts were circulating that falsely linked her to the Taliban, according to fact-checkers at The Quint. The message to Muslim women was clear: visibility itself is a provocation.
That message has been delivered consistently. Amnesty International documented the headscarf ban as one piece of a larger campaign against India's roughly 200 million Muslims under BJP governance, alongside the demolition of Muslim-owned homes, laws criminalizing marriages between Muslims and Hindus, and organized boycotts of Muslim market traders, per Amnesty's Human Rights Charter for India.
United Nations human rights experts formally warned India in June 2022 that the ban violated its obligations under international law, per an OHCHR communication.
India's Supreme Court took up the case and split without a resolution in October 2022, per MUNA Bulletin. The constitutional question remains open.
The Congress party reversed the ban. It also banned saffron scarves from classrooms, calling them tools of intimidation rather than religious expression, per the Times of India. The BJP called this “Muslim appeasement”. A federal minister claimed, without evidence, that the decision would lead to ‘Islamic law’ in Karnataka, as reported by Hindustan Times.
Human Rights Watch had already described BJP policies of this kind as systematic discrimination against religious minorities, in a formal submission to the United Nations.
The headscarf ban is over in Karnataka. The political infrastructure that built it remains intact nationally. For Muslim women in India, the battleground may have shifted, but it certainly has not disappeared.
