The politics of prejudice, awards in education

A controversy has emerged in Karnataka over the state government’s decision to withhold the Best Principal’s Award from B G Ramakrishna, principal of Kundapur Government Pre-University College. In February 2022, Ramakrishna had prevented hijab-wearing Muslim students from entering the college gates, citing government rules about uniforms
in the classroom. This incident raises several issues about politics in educational institutions.

Firstly, the state government’s decision to name Ramakrishna for the award and later withdraw it is questionable. If it was carelessness that led to this gaffe, then such carelessness can be politically expensive for the Congress government and can appear to be incompetency of governance. On the other hand, if the decision was deliberate, aimed at appeasing the hard-right Hindu vote bank in coastal Karnataka, the Congress party is indistinguishable from other parties accused of polarising communities and exploiting communal divides.

The Congress government has been accused of catering to the Muslim vote bank by supposedly withdrawing the award under pressure from the Social Democratic Party of India (SDPI).

However, a legitimate social concern doesn’t lose its significance because of its political origins. The law that bans hijab-wearing girls from the classroom is both reactionary as well as detrimental to women’s education and women’s emancipation. If the Congress genuinely wants to be seen as a progressive political party that is concerned about the welfare of women, it must be willing to forfeit the electoral gains that could be accrued by following a soft Hindutva policy.

In defence of B G Ramakrishna, it’s been said that he was merely following government rules that were brought into force to maintain the secular, neutral uniformity of the classroom. However, it is to be noted that this rule was implemented suddenly in an educational system that had previously allowed Muslim girls to wear hijab to school. While a few educational institutions had allowed for the wearing of the hijab as long as it was of a uniform colour, others had no mention of the hijab in their rulebooks. The sudden imposition of this rule disrupted the educational life of Muslim girls at a time when their admission into educational institutions was rapidly increasing in coastal Karnataka. It halted educational progress and led to the ghettoising of female Muslim students, forcing them to leave government institutions
and join Muslim educational institutions. This shut down interactions and friendships across religions, a strategy used by political forces
that polarise and segregate citizens.

How has the fiction of uniformity and its necessity become the commonsense of our society? How are we made to believe that the classroom is a culturally, religiously, ideologically, neutral space instantiated by the uniformity of dress and appearance? Such a commonsense has been institutionally produced by glossing over the social, religious, and historical origins and embeddedness of the uniform and many of the rituals followed by educational institutions.

Very often the religious rituals of a dominant religious or caste group are instituted and normalised within educational institutions, such that their religious origin is erased or made invisible, thereby maintaining the facade of religious neutrality.

The sartorial norms approved and sanctioned by majoritarian groups are institutionalised into the uniformity of the uniform to be worn in the classroom.  Sartorial conventions, corporeal markers, and the rituals through which embodied life is lived are multiple in a multireligious and multicultural society. This multiplicity will inflect and shape the ways in which learning and teaching are organised, practiced, and imbibed. It is through the coming together of the many practices and processes of embodied being, within the classroom and outside it, and their interaction and intersection with each other that education is enriched and learning becomes a lifelong, open-ended, creative, and transformative process. 

(The writer is Professor, Department of English,
Mangalore University)