The Indian Girls Banned By School For Wearing The Hijab

India's Supreme Court is set to rule on an explosive case that has seen six Muslim teenagers denied an education because they wear the controversial head-covering, writes Arpan Rai

- Arpan Rai

Aliya Assadi adjusts her teenage frame against the microphone to reach the right height as she speaks at the Town Hall building in the southern Indian port city of Mangalore. "My hijab does not cover my brain; I can educate myself even if my head is covered," Assadi, 17, tells hundreds of Muslim students and teachers.

She is one of a small group of Muslim teenagers who have not been allowed to attend school for seven months, simply because they refused to remove the hijab as demanded by the Hindumajority government in the southern Indian state of Karnataka.

Since leaving her classroom at Udupi Government College on 28 December, she has not been back. And the case has simmered at both a local and a national level. It has now reached India's Supreme Court, and a decision could be reached soon.

Karnataka has been embroiled in protests about head-coverings since last year after six teenagers were refused entry to school because they were wearing hijab. Local authorities ruled that wearing a hijab inside a classroom violated its school uniform policy. Those six morphed into a protest of hundreds across the state, who filed a petition in court.

The call of defiance reached most of Karnataka's major centres, including the temple city of Udupi, and the lines were drawn for a battle that still rages today. Why the girls argue, should they not continue their education while wearing hijab, in the same way, that Sikhism requires men to wear a turban, and Hindus must wear certain religious symbols such as vermillion on their foreheads?

Students of a college in Kundapur wearing hijab (AFP/Getty)

The authorities have refused to back down, and presented the girls with a choice - remove the head-covering to return to their pre-university college, or side with religious practice and go elsewhere.