Thread by @gauravsabnis

The more I read of the Karnataka hijab verdict, the more I can't even .... wow... the details make it even worse, if you can imagine.

It's like they not just delivered the main verdict but have also planted a lot of sections to be used by lawyers in the future arguing in court on behalf of more such Muslim targeting rules and laws. This is the Nuremberg Laws phase.

Of course this should go to the Supreme Court but I don't have much hope. That this even is a court case shows how deep the rot has set. That it even was a rule shows how deep the rot has set. It is offensive and demoralizing on every level, from Indian to human to educator.

An Indian high court in the year 2022 has decided it's okay to keep Muslim women out of (even government run or funded) colleges if they won't take off their hijab.

Let that sink in for a moment.

India is technically a secular democratic republic with an independent judiciary.

An old thread about this "pincer strategy" they're following from 1930s Germany. Mobs making incendiary speeches and if minorities go running to the state for help, find it drawing up its own legislation and court judgments to hit them too.

https://twitter.com/gauravsabnis/status/1460887175508246528?t=Gsm4aZN3xDrRmGbz_iMlbg&s=19

A vast majority of Germans in 1930s found the term "anti-semite" personally insulting if used against them. They thought it was all communist and American propaganda that all "Aryans" hated Jews.

https://twitter.com/gauravsabnis/status/1460914711885721603?t=Gsm4aZN3xDrRmGbz_iMlbg&s=19

Exactly what it is. By design. Following the 1930s German Pincer Strategy of inciting mobs against the minority with landmark laws/judgments that give the majority legal cover. Cos often, only the law protects minorities from majoritarian mobs.

https://twitter.com/nilanjanaroy/status/1503631063746498563?t=LvzSA7cf2IWi_1jIKpqzbQ&s=19

You can't weaponize mobs and still pretend to be a constitutional republic when the whole point of constitutional republics is to protect individuals from mobs.

So you have to give mobs legal cover simultaneously. So you can pretend mobs are not mobs but "protesters".

Sangh is still hell-bent on retaining the "biggest democracy in the world" label, just like Nazis were hell-bent on being considered civilized people, not bloodthirsty bigots.

So there have to be a lot of laws and favorable court judgments to go with the mob violence.

A democratic republic gives the majority a lot of power by design, so minorities are bound to ask, what if tomorrow 51% of y'all start dictating EVERYTHING to 49% of us?

Constitution, laws, judiciary are supposed to prevent that. So they have to be subverted simultaneously.

A constitutional Democratic republic cannot survive without explicit, even excessive protections for minorities. That's not "appeasement". That's the basic point of this system of governance.

Once you start weaponizing the majority, it's no longer a republic.

Without explicit and aggressive protection from the government and the judiciary, minorities in any democracy are left with no other recourse for help. They aren't numerically enough to win elections. And now even gormint & courts hate them.

What is left for them if targeted?

Do you see how badly and horribly and cruelly 200 million plus Indian Muslims are being backed into a corner by sanghis? And Indian Muslims are, if you think about it in objective historic terms that matter, THE most model minority in the history of humanity.

200+ million Indian Muslims for 75 years have given, overwhelmingly, their everything to this experiment we call the Democratic socialist secular republic of India. They've always been Indians first where it matters.

And they, of all people, are being cast as villains?

Sure, among the 200+ million and their hundreds of million dead relatives, there are some who are evil and violent. But not in numbers greater than any other community.

We Hindu savarnas put our terrorists in parliament and use theirs to tarnish a huge patriotic 200mn people?

Do people not see what they are laying the ground for? Making hijab wearing Muslim young women going to college as their target BTW, not even some scary violent "terrorist". They are literally creating a schism to glamorize stopping women from going to college.

WHAT
THE
FUCK

While the world worries about whether Taliban will continue to let girls go to school and women go to work, a state high court in the biggest secular democratic republic in the world has decided that it's okay to bar hijab wearing adult women from public colleges.

It's bad!

Hath not a Muslim eyes? Hath not a Muslim hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Hindu is?

If we prick them, do they not bleed? If we tickle them, do they not laugh? If we poison them, do they not die? And if we wrong them, shall they not revenge?

If they are like us in the rest, they will resemble us in that.

If they are like us in the rest, they will resemble us in that. If a Muslim wrong a Hindu, what is his response? Revenge. If a Hindu wrong a Muslim, what should his punishment then be by the Hindu example? Why, revenge.

The villainy we teach them, they will execute, and it shall go hard but they will better the instruction.
---

Shakespeare adapted.

Don't my fellow Hindus who support the sangh get this basic point?

A personal note. I've been teaching college courses for 15 years and almost every single year, there's a Muslim woman in a hijab or less often, a Mennonite or Orthodox Jewish woman, also with their hair covered. Many dudes wear bandanas.

It affects my teaching not at all!

Also at Stevens, I teach many classes where you can literally see ground zero from the window. Our veteran staff & faculty have clear memories of 9/11/01 and how it looked from Hoboken.

No one has ever even thought of "banning" hijabs. In a campus shut down by 9/11.

In fact, it's the opposite. We get told formally and informally about how it's OUR job as faculty & staff to make sure students in hijab are not singled out for any prejudice. And if they are, to proactively stop it. That's part of my job. To be extra mindful of these factors.

Why it is extra offensive and even outrageous to me that a high court in my country of birth thinks it is okay for colleges to prevent Muslim women from getting an education unless they take hijabs off.

It has zero educational point.

100% targeted bigotry.

Fascism. Simple.

And that too Karnataka? Really? Karnataka of all places is going to lead the charge on this? Saying that a few women getting education with their heads covered can be banned from college is happening in Karnataka?

Blatantly fascist. Picking on the weakest easiest targets.