On Thursday, the Islamist petitioner who happened to challenge the Karnataka HC’s order on the hijab issue criticised Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar’s statement extracted from High Court’s judgment and called it ‘offensive’. Senior advocate Colin Gonsalves appearing for the pro-hijab students stated that Ambedkar’s words were deeply offensive and biased.
“It is not a statement that should be repeated in India, great though he may have been”, he added.
According to the reports, the comments followed an exchange with the SC bench led by Justices Hemant Gupta and Sudhanshu Dhulia about the HC judgment on the hijab matter. Gonsalves claimed to have read the entire HC judgment and alleged that the court had delivered the judgment from the majoritarian perspective. He also said that the judgment in no way conformed to constitutional independence.
For #Hijab, they canceled #Ambedkar
— Shashank Shekhar Jha (@shashank_ssj) September 15, 2022
He is a pillar but his statement is offensive, a statement which shouldn’t be repeated in India
-Sr Adv Gonsalves in #SupremeCourt
I made submissions for @SanjeevSanskrit @swati_gs @DharmaOfVedas in Karnataka HC which became part of judgement pic.twitter.com/KsfCixI22I
He read a few paragraphs from the HC judgment which linked the wearing of hijab to cultural practices of the past, women’s emancipation, and the developing of scientific temperament. “So (according to HC), hijab is not a part of religion…. I wear the hijab, (but according to HC) I can’t be emancipated. I wear the hijab, I can’t have scientific temperament”, Gonsalves read adding that the HC judgment was not worth relying upon for the final verdict. According to him, the HC order associated the wearing of hijab with indiscipline and anarchy, as well as social segregation and sectarianism of all kinds.
However, Justice Dhulia intervened senior advocate and asked him to stop criticizing the HC judge. “This was said about what Dr Ambedkar had said at some point in time. So it is not the judge saying it”, Justice Dhulia stated. He also slammed the advocate for deliberately cherry-picking the statement from the HC judgment and reading it in a different context. “The verdict cannot be read like a statute, cherry-picking (here and there)…this was said in some different context altogether”, Justice Dhulia was quoted.
The HC in its judgment had referred to Ambedkar’s statement from his book ‘Pakistan or the Partition of India’ and had said, “What the chief architect of our Constitution observed more than half a century ago about the purdah practice equally applies to wearing of the hijab. There is a lot of scope for the argument that insistence on wearing of purdah, veil, or headgear in any community may hinder the process of emancipation of women in general and Muslim women in particular”.
Justice Dhulia directed the senior advocate appearing for the hijab girls not to play with the words in the HC judgment. Meanwhile, Gonsalves reiterated that the HC judgment was not worth relying upon and that it was biased. He asked why the hijab cannot be allowed if Sikhs can be allowed to wear a turban. Also, senior advocate Kapil Sibal, who appeared for the appellants, questioned whether the fundamental right of hijab-wearing girls to enter the school being extinguished if they were allowed to wear hijab in public but not inside the school.
Further Advocate Prashant Bhushan argued that the government school can have a uniform but cannot restrict the hijab. Hijab, according to Advocate Shoeb Alam, is an issue of personal identity, and the amount to which an individual decides to cover his or her body to feel protected from public scrutiny is a personal choice. He contended that the right could not be revoked just because a person was in a public location. The Court will hear the case next on September 19.
