NEW DELHI: A high court in India’s southern state of Karnataka upheld on Tuesday a ban on the wearing of hijab in classrooms, ruling that the Muslim head covering is not “essential” to Islam.
The hijab controversy took off in late January after Muslim girls at a government-run secondary school in Karnataka’s Udupi district began protesting a new rule that prevented them from attending classes if they wore the hijab.
After the local administration backed the school and banned the wearing of the hijab and “clothes which disturbed peace” at educational institutions, a small peaceful protest held by the Udupi schoolgirls grew into rallies that spilled into other states.
The Karnataka High Court’s ruling comes after weeks of deliberations following petitions arguing that India’s constitution guarantees Muslim women the right to wear headscarves.
The court dismissed the pleas, saying the state government had the right to prescribe uniforms for students.
“The school regulations prescribing dress code for all the students as one homogeneous class serve constitutional secularism,” Chief Justice Ritu Raj Awasthi of the Karnataka High Court said in the judgment.
“We are of the considered opinion that the wearing of the hijab by Muslim women does not form a part of essential religious practice.”
The court also said that students cannot object to school uniforms, prescribing it is a “reasonable restriction and constitutionally permissible.”
Activists fear the hijab ban could pave the way for further discriminatory measures targeting the Muslim community, which makes up about 12 percent of the population in Karnataka, a state that is a stronghold of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party.
“The verdict is unacceptable, unjust and violates human rights and constitutional rights. It dehumanizes Muslim women and sets a disturbing precedent,” student activist Afreen Fatima said.
“The ruling BJP and the right-wing forces have co-opted Indian institutions and the court is also becoming a tool in the hands of the majoritarian forces to further humiliate Muslims.”
Since coming to power in 2019, the local government has passed a series of rules seen as discriminating against Muslims and other religious minorities, including regulations making it difficult for interfaith couples to marry, and for people to convert to Islam or Christianity.
Poet and teacher Nabiya Khan, who wears the hijab, said the verdict is “emotionally exhausting.”
Shayma S, a Muslim activist and doctoral student at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, told Arab News that the ban amounted to “literal denial of education and women’s right to exercise their choice.
“The rights of the minorities are being violated in many ways. This is one more layer to that violation,” she said, expressing hope that the Karnataka ruling would be reversed.
Anas Tanveer, a lawyer representing the petitioners, said the decision is going to be challenged in the Supreme Court.
“The court has gone into essential religious practice when it should not have,” he told Arab News.
“The question essentially is whether the state has power to issue such notifications which are against the law, the statute or the rules.”
Indian court upholds state hijab ban in schools, colleges
https://arab.news/rxpcy
Indian court upholds state hijab ban in schools, colleges
- Karnataka High Court said students “cannot object to uniforms prescribed by schools”
- Ruling comes after protests that spilled into other Indian states
Trump set to repeal scientific finding that serves as basis for US climate change policy
- The endangerment finding is the legal underpinning of nearly all climate regulations under the Clean Air Act for motor vehicles, power plants and other pollution sources that are heating the planet
WASHINGTON: The Trump administration on Thursday will revoke a scientific finding that long has been the central basis for US action to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and fight climate change, the White House announced.
The Environmental Protection Agency will issue a final rule rescinding a 2009 government declaration known as the endangerment finding. That Obama-era policy determined that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare.
President Donald Trump and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin will “formalize the rescission of the 2009 Obama-era endangerment finding” at a White House ceremony, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday.
The action “will be the largest deregulatory action in American history, and it will save the American people $1.3 trillion in crushing regulations,” she said. The bulk of the savings will stem from reduced costs for new vehicles, with the EPA projecting average per vehicle savings of more than $2,400 for popular light-duty cars, SUVs and trucks. Leavitt said.
The endangerment finding is the legal underpinning of nearly all climate regulations under the Clean Air Act for motor vehicles, power plants and other pollution sources that are heating the planet. It is used to justify regulations, such as auto emissions standards, intended to protect against threats made increasingly severe by climate change — deadly floods, extreme heat waves, catastrophic wildfires and other natural disasters in the United States and around the world.
Legal challenges would be certain for any action that effectively would repeal those regulations, with environmental groups describing the shift as the single biggest attack in US history on federal efforts to address climate change.
EPA press secretary Brigit Hirsch said the Obama-era rule was “one of the most damaging decisions in modern history” and said EPA “is actively working to deliver a historic action for the American people.”
Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax,” previously issued an executive order that directed EPA to submit a report on “the legality and continuing applicability” of the endangerment finding. Conservatives and some congressional Republicans have long sought to undo what they consider overly restrictive and economically damaging rules to limit greenhouse gases that cause global warming.
Zeldin, a former Republican congressman who was tapped by Trump to lead EPA last year, has criticized his predecessors in Democratic administrations, saying they were “willing to bankrupt the country” in an effort to combat climate change.
Democrats “created this endangerment finding and then they are able to put all these regulations on vehicles, on airplanes, on stationary sources, to basically regulate out of existence ... segments of our economy,″ Zeldin said in announcing the proposed rule last July. ”And it cost Americans a lot of money.”
Peter Zalzal, a lawyer and associate vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund, countered that the EPA will be encouraging more climate pollution, higher health insurance and fuel costs and thousands of avoidable premature deaths.
Zeldin’s push “is cynical and deeply damaging, given the mountain of scientific evidence supporting the finding, the devastating climate harms Americans are experiencing right now and EPA’s clear obligation to protect Americans’ health and welfare,” he said.
Zalzal and other critics noted that the Supreme Court ruled in a 2007 case that planet-warming greenhouse gases, caused by burning of oil and other fossil fuels, are air pollutants under the Clean Air Act.
Since the high court’s decision, in a case known as Massachusetts v. EPA, courts have uniformly rejected legal challenges to the endangerment finding, including a 2023 decision by the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Following Zeldin’s proposal to repeal the rule, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine reassessed the science underpinning the 2009 finding and concluded it was “accurate, has stood the test of time, and is now reinforced by even stronger evidence.”
Much of the understanding of climate change that was uncertain or tentative in 2009 is now resolved, the NAS panel of scientists said in a September report. “The evidence for current and future harm to human health and welfare created by human-caused greenhouse gases is beyond scientific dispute,” the panel said.
