Hijab row lessons from udupi

Hijab row lessons from udupi

Shift of Muslim women students to private pre-university colleges, but fall in government college enrollment is troubling.

About this time last year, when Karnataka’s Udupi district was stricken by the hijab row, colleges and universities in the state were witnessing a significant development. Classrooms were registering a steady increase in the number of Muslim women students. The percentage of women from the community, aged 18-23 years, attending colleges and universities had gone up from 1.1 per cent in 2007-08 to 15.8 per cent in 2017-18. It was feared that the state government’s heavy-handed decision to ban headscarves in educational institutions would hurt the confidence of the young women and roll back this educational efflorescence. The youngsters, however, stood firm in face of difficult odds: They challenged the order, first, in the Karnataka High Court and then, in the Supreme Court. In October last year, a two-judge bench of the apex court could not come to a unanimous decision on the matter — it will now be decided by a larger bench that has not yet been constituted. But, as a report in this newspaper on Sunday shows, the judicial impasse and the charged atmosphere have not dented the enthusiasm for academic learning amongst Muslim women in Karnataka, especially in the region that was the epicentre of the controversy.

The hijab ban did not affect exam attendance in Udupi last year. Even more hearteningly, the overall enrollment of Muslim women hasn’t fallen. There is, however, a notable shift: The number of women students from the community who attend government pre-university colleges (PUC) has come down by half from last year. This has been offset by an increase in their enrolment across private (or unaided) PUCs in the district.

Not every student, however, can afford education in a private college. It is troubling, therefore, that Muslim women’s enrollment in Udupi’s government PUCs in 2022-23 was the lowest in five years. Karnataka’s Minister of School Education and Literacy B C Nagesh said that the government will probe these figures. For starters, he would do well to ignore the comments of his party colleague and Udupi MLA Raghupati Bhat who has ascribed the decline to a conspiracy by organisations such as the PFI. A more worthwhile response would be to think of ways to make the state more sensitive to the aspirations and concerns of students.