‘God does what he pleases’: Hijab ban protester takes a dig at expelled BJP leader Raghupati Bhat

After Bhat was denied a ticket in the Assembly elections, he rebelled against the BJP and decided to contest the MLC elections.

Assadi, one of the petitioners in the hijab case in the Supreme Court, in a post on X on Tuesday said, “Sixty days before the annual exams, I was expelled from college just for wearing a hijab, and your party (BJP) celebrated it as a great achievement. But today, I witnessed the moment when your party expelled you, while still in my hijab. Back then, I was an expelled student and you had a position in the party. Today, I am a law student and you are an expelled person (sic).”

Bhat, however, did not respond to calls by The Indian Express.

The hijab row erupted in December 2021 after six women students of the Government PU College, where Bhat was the president of the College Development Committee, claimed they were not allowed to attend classes wearing the hijab. The protests soon spread to other districts and the state government passed an order for students to stick to prescribed uniforms in PUC (Class 11 and 12) and degree college.

Aliya Assadi is among the group of five Muslim girls who had challenged in the Karnataka High Court the government’s ban on wearing hijab inside classrooms. The court later dismissed their plea saying the headgear did not constitute an essential religious practice in Islam. She had walked out of the examination centre at Vidyodaya PU College in April 2022 after they were told they would have to remove the hijab if they wanted to sit for the pre-university examination.

The matter is still under sub judice after the Supreme Court in October 2022 delivered a split judgment, wherein Justice Hemant Gupta upheld the Karnataka High Court order validating the ban and said “it was only to promote uniformity and encourage a secular environment” in classrooms. However, Justice Sudhanshu Dhulia, underlining that all that matters is the education of the girl child, set aside the High Court order and called the right to wear the hijab in classrooms “a matter of choice”, and a “fundamental right” linked to the girl’s “dignity and her privacy even when she is inside the school gates”.