India’s Supreme Court on Tuesday, Aug. 2, said that it will set up an appellate panel to examine a number of appeals challenging the Karnataka high court’s decision not to overturn the state’s prohibition on students wearing the hijab in public schools. Senior counsel Meenakshi Arora, representing one of the appellants, made her arguments before a bench that included Chief Justice N.V. Ramana and Justices Krishna Murari and Hima Kohli. “A bench will be built by me. A judge is ill, according to the Chief Justice of India.
Arora stated that the appeals against the high court judgement had been submitted back in March, but had not yet been scheduled for hearing. “Wait. According to CJI Ramana, if the judges had been okay, the subject would have come up.
An agreement was made by India’s supreme court on July 13th to consider petitions contesting the Karnataka high court’s decision. Prashant Bhushan, a lawyer, has previously said that the girls were failing their classes and had difficulty with their schoolwork. Girls’ schooling in the state has been affected or disrupted by the state’s prohibition on the headscarf.
Students from Uppinangady Government First Grade College in Tamil Nadu were expelled in June after staging a demonstration to demand that they be allowed to wear the hijab in class. When the management of the University College at Hampankatta in Mangaluru, which likewise prohibited girls from wearing hijabs in classes, received a transfer request from five Muslim female students, they granted it.
As agreed upon, the matter would be placed on the CJI’s docket the “following week.” Also on April 26, an urgent hearing for appeals against a court’s March 15 decision to deny permission to wear the hijab at school was scheduled to take place. As a result of the Karnataka high court ruling that the wearing of the hijab is not an important religious practice, many applications have been filed in the Supreme Court challenging this decision.
A group of Muslim girls at the Government Pre-University Girls College in Udupi had petitioned the high court to allow them to wear the hijab in the classroom. However, the court rejected their request. The top court ruled that “the prescription of school uniform is just a reasonable constraint, legally permitted, which the pupils cannot complain to,”
As the petitioner put it, the Supreme Court made a mistake by inferring that persons who adhere to religion cannot have the right to conscience when it made the distinction between religious freedom and freedom of conscience in one of its rulings.
According to Article 21 of India’s Constitution, women’s right to privacy includes their choice to wear a headscarf. “It is argued that the right to privacy includes the right to freedom of conscience,” it stated. The petitioner said that the state government’s decision of February 5, 2022, issued under Sections 7 and 133 of the Karnataka Education Act, 1983, violated their basic rights.
The high court ruled that the government has the authority to issue the February 5, 2022, decree in question and that there is no basis for invalidating it. Karnataka issued a decree prohibiting students from wearing clothing that “disturbs equity, integrity, and public order,” which the Muslim students had taken to the high court to fight.
High court petitioners had contended that wearing an Islamic headscarf was an innocent profession of religion and important religious practice, and not a demonstration of religious jingoism, in their challenge to the government’s February 5 decree. It was claimed that the limitation on free speech infringed on the rights granted by Article 19(1)(A) and Article 21, which deals with personal liberty.