India court: No religious clothes until hijab row settled

NEW DELHI: A courtroom in a southern Indian state instructed college students on Thursday to not put on any non secular clothes till it delivers a verdict on petitions in search of to overturn a ban on hijabs, headscarves utilized by Muslim ladies.
The courtroom in Karnataka state is contemplating petitions filed by college students difficult a ban on hijabs that some faculties have applied in latest weeks.
“We are going to go an order. However until the matter is resolved, no pupil ought to insist on sporting non secular gown,” the Press Belief of India information company quoted Chief Justice Ritu Raj Awasthi as saying.
The courtroom additionally directed the state to reopen faculties and faculties which the chief minister had shut for 3 days as protests over the ban escalated earlier this week.
The problem grabbed headlines final month when a government-run faculty in Karnataka’s Udupi district barred college students sporting hijabs from coming into lecture rooms, triggering protests exterior the college gate. Extra faculties within the state adopted with related bans, forcing the state’s high courtroom to intervene.
The uneasy standoff has raised fears amongst Muslim college students who say they’re being disadvantaged of their non secular rights within the Hindu-majority nation. On Monday, lots of of scholars and fogeys took to the streets to protest the restriction.
The dispute in Karnataka has set off protests elsewhere in India. A lot of demonstrators have been detained within the capital, New Delhi, on Thursday, and college students and activists have additionally marched in cities together with Hyderabad and Kolkata in latest days.
It additionally captured consideration in neighboring Muslim-majority Pakistan. “Depriving Muslim women of an schooling is a grave violation of elementary human rights,” its overseas minister, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, tweeted on Wednesday, calling the scenario “completely oppressive.”
Nobel Peace Prize laureate and schooling activist Malala Yousafzai additionally condemned the ban. “Refusing to let women to go to high school of their hijabs is horrifying,” the 24-year-old Pakistani human rights campaigner tweeted.
For a lot of Muslim ladies, the hijab is a part of their religion and a method to preserve modesty. It has been a supply of controversy for many years in some Western international locations, notably in France, which in 2004 banned them from being worn in public faculties.
In India, the place Muslims make up about 14 p.c of the nation’s nearly 1.4 billion folks, they don’t seem to be banned or restricted in public locations and are a standard sight.
Some rights activists have voiced issues that the bans may improve Islamophobia. Violence and hate speech in opposition to Muslims have elevated underneath Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s governing Hindu nationalist occasion, which additionally governs Karnataka state.