Supreme Court to hear pleas against Karnataka hijab order today

The cases have been listed for the first hearing five months after they were filed and on the first working day of new Chief Justice of India (CJI) Uday Umesh Lalit

The Supreme Court will on Monday hear a bunch of petitions against the Karnataka high court’s verdict on March 15 that wearing of hijab by Muslim women does not form a part of essential religious practice in Islam.

A full bench of the Karnataka high court, on March 15, declared that wearing of hijab is not mandatory in Islam.

The cases have been listed for the first hearing five months after they were filed and on the first working day of new Chief Justice of India (CJI) Uday Umesh Lalit.

A bench of justices Hemant Gupta and Sudhanshu Dhulia will consider the petitions, which have failed to get even a preliminary hearing since March.

A full bench of the Karnataka high court, on March 15, declared that wearing of hijab is not mandatory in Islam. It upheld the ban on the headscarf imposed by the state government in schools and colleges through a February 5 executive order, which led to massive protests and counter-protests across the state and in several other cities across the country.

The high court’s three-judge bench, headed by chief justice Ritu Raj Awasthi, held that the Quran does not mandate wearing of hijab for Muslim women and that the attire “at the most is a means to gain access to public places” and a “measure of social security”, but “not a religious end in itself”.

The high court also favoured a “speedy and effective” investigation into the stoking of the hijab controversy in Karnataka, suspecting some “unseen hands at work to engineer social unrest and disharmony in the state”.

Dismissing a bunch of petitions filed by some girl students pressing wearing of hijab as their religious right protected under the Constitution, the high court upheld the state government’s authority to prescribe uniform in educational institutions under the Karnataka Education Act, while declaring that “adherence to dress code is a mandatory for students”.

Hours later, Niba Naaz filed an appeal in the Supreme Court, arguing that the high court erred in creating a dichotomy of freedom of religion and freedom of conscience wherein the court has inferred that those who follow a religion cannot have the right to conscience.

Aishat Shifa, another petitioner before the high court, also filed an appeal in the Supreme Court a day after the high court judgment. The petition by students of PU College in Udupi – the epicentre of the original protests seeking to wear the hijab – was mentioned by Kamat for an urgent hearing on March 16 when the court said it would look into the plea but did not set down the cases for hearing.

The petitioners’ lawyers requested former CJI NV Ramana multiple times between March and July to list the cases but to no avail.