India unveiled

We wore uniforms to school.  Grey shorts (or pants) and white shirts for boys.  Black shoes with white socks.  Girls wore white tops with skirts that were grey.

For a couple of years, we had a principal who was a retired military officer.   Yes, a retired military man!

I have no idea whether Lt. Col. Thamburaj had any classroom teaching experience with elementary or high school kids.  He came to us from a Sainik School.  Sainik schools were established by the federal government's defense department in order to provide a pathway for young minds to think about eventually serving in the Indian military.  Our school was no Sainik School.

The only significant change that Thamburaj introduced was inspecting students up and down at the school assembly under a blazing morning sun. 

As if we were military cadets and he were the ranking officer, Thamburaj walked past us standing in attention while he made sure that there was no shirt untucked, no shoe unpolished, and whatever else he thought was required to be the mark of a good student at our school. 

Much later in life, when reading in Catch-22 the insanity of marching parades, I had a good laugh thinking about the absurdity of Thamburaj inspecting our uniforms.

Through all those years as a lifer in the school, I never came across any girl student in school wearing a head-cover.  If at all, I am now shocked that traditional and conservative parents allowed their daughters to go to school wearing pinafore skirts that revealed their legs from the knees down!

What would have happened if a girl's parents wanted her to attend our school, but didn't want her to wear a calf-revealing skirt?  Would Thamburaj have allowed a girl to wear hijab--in grey, in order to conform to the school uniform colors?  How would I have reacted to a classmate wearing a hijab?

Counter-factual thinking about the past is a challenge.  Yet, I suspect that Thamburaj would not have allowed hijabs.  The principal who succeeded him would not have either.  Not because I think they were Islamophobic, but because they were disciplinarians who did not encourage diversity.  A deviation from the school uniform would have driven them crazy.

Chances are that most of us students would have thought that wearing a hijab is a Muslim act, like how we Hindus had vibhuthi and kungumam on our foreheads.  And we would have carried on with our lives.

But then those were the years when Hindu fundamentalists were marginal players in India's politics, and were held in suspect as troublemakers.  India is different now with Hindu nationalists governing from Delhi and in power in many states in the union. 

Display of Muslim beliefs, even in schools, bothers these nationalists.  The judiciary increasingly agrees with the Hindu majoritarians: "An Indian court has said that students in the southern state of Karnataka should stop wearing religious garments in class until it makes a final ruling on whether a school there can ban Muslim head scarves".

“We think it’s really unfair to ask Muslim women to suspend their faith for a few days while the court completes its hearing,” Fawaz Shaheen, national secretary of the Students Islamic Organization of India, a Delhi-based group with over 9,000 members, said of the court’s Thursday statement.

If vibhuthi and kungumam wearing students could pursue science without suspending their faith, why the hijab or niqab should not be allowed is simply beyond my imagination.

Leefa Mahek, an 11th-grade student who said her head scarf had not been mentioned as a problem by administrators when she was admitted to the school a year ago. With only two months left in the school term, she said she was worried that the ban was jeopardizing her future. 

“Last minute they are trying to pour water over our hard work,” she said. “They can’t do this.” 

Arsheen, a final-year commerce student who uses only one name, said that she had worn the hijab in colors matching the school uniform — baggy brown pants and a long pink and white blouse — each of the three years she had attended the school. 

“Hijab is our right, and nobody can make us give it up,” she said.

Like in the US where the bigots have now been given permission to display in public their hate for non-whites and those who are not Christians, India's politics has completely unveiled the anti-Muslim emotions that only lurked in the shadows for the longest time.  These Islamophobic forces are willing to deny girls the right to school, eerily mirroring the Taliban that tried to assassinate Malala for merely wanting to go to school!

Now that these forces have been unleashed, it will take a long, long time before humanity comes to its senses.