The narrative that has always driven the Hijab issue is one of the Hijab and the burqa being a restricting dress for women, and that Muslim women and girls need to be rescued from this restriction by the dominant community. This narrative unfortunately is the narrative that drives much positioning on issues that the country and the world is going through today. What such a narrative achieves is to push under the carpet the restrictions that the women of the dominant community face, and to target the entire minority community, in the name of addressing women’s rights issues. This is not to take away from the rights of women from any community to dress without restrictions just like men, but to state that the issue is far from the issue of the right to dress as one pleases.
My first stark understanding of the issue of the right to dress, came from a case that we were confronted with several years ago, as a women’s collective Bailancho Saad, where a woman complained that she enjoyed wearing a burqa and her school management (which incidentally was a Muslim management) would cause it to be hidden or just removed, when she left it in the staff room, when going to class, as a way of annoying her, since they had some scores to settle with her.
This confused me at first, for two reasons. First, here was a Muslim management, who I thought would enforce wearing of a burqa. Second, here was a Muslim woman who was asserting her right to wear a burqa, where again, I thought that no woman would ever like to wear a burqa. But a careful scrutiny of the issue brought some points home. That the edicts of imposition of dress by the State or by any community are those of control and power, which in turn is very different from the issue of a woman’s agency or right to wear or not wear a particular dress.
There have been and are many occasions, where the issue of dress has surfaced, in many different forms, but all indicating that imposition of a dress code or representation of dress is a tool of control, be it for suppressing women or suppressing a community or for profits. For instance, there were cases where there were suggestions that a woman was raped because of the revealing dress she wore….and here, we had to point out to studies carried out in countries where the majority of women wore burqa, that even women wearing a full burqa where only the eyes are visible, get raped.
Women are often assigned blame for facing sexual violence, stating that they were wearing revealing low neck dresses or mini dresses, because wearing revealing dresses provokes men. To this, I never tire of saying that the sari can also be quite revealing and so also the kaxtti, and that no one attributes rape to the wearing of such dresses. Similarly, one does not come across cases of sexual violence against males because they are wearing tight fitting clothes, or G-strings. Clearly, therefore, this is an issue of social conditioning and social control?
Yet, the State has been complicit in either promoting or disregarding advertisements that display women in swim suits by a swimming pool, as part of promotion of Goa, or of hotels, where women are commodified, and reduced to objects, to attract tourists to Goa and to build a particular narrative of an unwritten consent of Goan women to availability for sex. This again is different from women having a right to use a swim suit, for instance, at the swimming pool, or when they go for a swim at the beach.
And then again, you have the likes of the current MLA and also a supporter of the present ruling dispensation, who has made brazen statements such as that “The (practice of) young girls going to pubs in short dresses does not fit in our culture. What will happen to our Goan culture, if we allow this…The scantily dressed girls visiting pubs project wrong culture and this should be stopped.” This again is a reinforcement of the double standards that we see.
Not long ago, a woman was not allowed to enter the examination centre, to answer certain exams, because of the dress she was wearing.
The Hijab issue is just a continuum of the bullying of women of minority communities and tarnishing of minority communities. The recent Karnataka High Court Order has been assailed precisely because it fails to look at the issue for what it really is. In an aptly worded and powerful statement assailing the order, which has received a resounding response, it is pointed that the Order “implies that the practice of Hijab itself militates against women, and thus should not be allowed in schools and colleges” and that in doing so, it fails to understand the very concept of women’s autonomy and consent, since it fails to distinguish between forcible imposition of religious practices on women against their will; and women’s choice to observe certain practices based on their free will’. The statement asserts that “Emancipation lies in respecting the autonomy of girls and women, not in forcing practices on them in the name of either religion or secularism”. In the same statement, attention is also drawn to the fact that “it was Hindu-supremacist groups that disrupted colleges, forcing them to amend the rules to selectively prohibit hijabs”.
One can thus see the double standards operating, where there is a selective narrative and strategy to control and bully women and girls, and suppression of minority communities in the name of dress, and thereby impose a hegemony of the majority community.
(Albertina Almeida is a lawyer and human
rights activist)
