As India turns 75, Muslim girls are suing to wear the hijab — and protect secularism
UDUPI, India — Ayesha Shifa is a 16-year-old with a passion for playing badminton with her younger siblings, and a knack for crunching numbers. She loves math and wants to be an accountant. But her dreams — and those of millions of Indian Muslim girls like her — are on hold, thanks to a new rule her school imposed last winter.
In early February, parents of all the Muslim students at Shifa's public high school in southwest India were called into a meeting. The principal told them their daughters could no longer wear the hijab, or Muslim headscarf, in class. They'd have to remove it or stay home from school.
"We were shocked because they'd never mentioned any rule like that before, and we'd even asked about it when we enrolled her two years ago," recalls Shifa's aunt Malika, 27, who goes by one name and attended the principal's conference that day. "After two years of COVID lockdown, and then just two months after the school reopened, this new rule came."
The principal told them it was part of a new dress code after lots of Muslim girls returned to in-person classes wearing headscarves, which they hadn't worn before the pandemic.
More than one in six Indians is Muslim. They're the biggest minority in this Hindu-majority country. Shifa comes from a devout Muslim family in Udupi, a district along India's Malabar coast in the southern state
