Last week, when most mainstream media was in the middle of yet another paroxysmal bout of Islamophobia over a thirteen-year-old child’s wish to wear the hijab to school, I was thinking: why is hijabophobia the most acceptable manifestation of the hatred of Islam in Kerala? Why is it that it seems to provoke many non-Muslim women to the point of anti-Muslim hysteria?

The newest episode in the longer history of hijabophobia in Kerala just played out in a CBSE school run by Catholic nuns in Palluruthy, Kochi. An eighth-standard student from the Muslim community was excluded from classes because she wore a headscarf to class. The Principal of the school, Sr Helena, allegedly told her that her headscarf “terrified other students” and that it was against the school uniform policy. When her father complained to the education authorities, he was subjected to a kind of mass bullying online and offline — by the school authorities, the press, even by the local politicians of the Congress, and the members the pro-BJP Christian Association and Alliance for Social Action (CAASA). He was accused of being a nuisance, lending his ear to ‘illegal’ Muslim organizations, threatening ‘secularism’, exhibiting allegedly ‘typical’ Muslim-male abhorrence towards female education. The distressed family decided to shift their child from St Rita’s, and the father made a statement that she was under severe mental stress.

As the controversy unfolded, many fingers, including that of the aggrieved father, pointed towards the CAASA leader Joshi Kaithavalappil, the President of the Parent-Teacher Association at the St Rita’s School. He was, apparently, the Troublemaker-In-Chief; some allege that far from having anything to do with ‘secularism of any kind, Mr Kaithavalappil even renamed the road in front of the school which was simply called ‘school road’ as ‘St Augustine’s Convent Road’.

However, the timing of this attack, probably meant to foment anti-Muslim hatred as the local body elections draw close, was all wrong. Instead of caving in as usual, the Kerala Education Department put up a strong fight supporting the student and defending her right to dress as she deemed appropriate, honouring her religious faith. Education Minister V Sivankutty’s statement, based on a report on the issue produced by the local education department authorities, has been a breath of fresh air. But it was ‘rejected’ by the PTA president and the Principal Sr Heleena as thought it were the easiest thing to do.

It was a strange experience, seeing Sr Heleena on TV with her lawyer. Both seemed hyper-excited to be on TV, as though they finally were receiving the attention that they ‘deserved’. There was a strange triumphal confidence in their statements about ‘secularism’. There was indeed an unholy glee on their faces as they defended their action — the sly way in which they had excluded the child without excluding it technically speaking. Their claims were wackily out of sync with not just the Indian Constitution, but even the Kerala Education Rules — clearly, these defender of ‘secularism’ had read neither of these. One did not know whether to laugh or be afraid. Neither needed to speak in English, but Sr Heleena seemed hell-bent on using English, as though that was enough to establish her credentials as a responsible educator.

The confidence with which they blurted out the most outrageous and dangerous nonsense seemed to rest on the assumed presence of their ‘base supporters’ out there — as though they were sure that their views would resonate with equally deluded Islamophobes out there. It is this alone that explains how the veiled nun Sr Heleena Alby, with a strange grin — scary and wacky in equal parts — plastered on her fact throughout her entire performance, could go on and on about how religious attire in school was a threat to secularism in school — without explaining how, if that was the case, a nun, whose whole life, and not just attire, was religious, could teach at all in ‘secular’ schools’. As her old schoolmates pointed out in their FB posts, the same Alby had won a nun’s habit with the veil while she was a Higher Secondary School student back in the days! It also explains how her lawyer, the self-styled the guardian of ‘secular public life’, could display the symbols of Hindu wifehood in lurid prominence on her forehead as she thundered in public against a child and her Muslim headscarf. The bloomers she made made me seriously doubt not only her legal education, but also whether she had actually ever come across at least the Kerala State Class Seventh or Eighth-Grade Civics syllabus. She too was confident that her bullshit would be swallowed without question by Islamophobes ‘out there’. So also, the Catholic newspaper Deepika’s strange interpretation of the rights of ‘minority institutions’ — the right to oppress other minorities seemed included in those.

This confidence was also bolstered most probably by the wimpy response of the Congress MP Hibi Eden and other Congress leaders — they just wanted the whole bloody thing settled, no matter that the child and her parents would be given short shrift. The usual shushing of Muslims when they complain about Islamophobia would suffice, they thought. It would have succeeded, had the Education Minister and the Kerala High Court had not stepped up to put these pestilence-bearers in their place. The High Court stopped the lawyer’s rant about ‘Hindu students’ and ‘Muslim students’, reminding her that it was enough to be concerned about ‘students’ in general.

Indeed, we have just witnessed how crucial the willingness of the government to discipline cultural bullies is, in making Malayali Muslims feel secure. One hopes and prays that this determination endures beyond the elections. This is what one expects of a Left government, and V Sivankutty’s action is commendable indeed. School uniforms in Kerala have never served any purpose other than as a leveler of class, with limited success. It needs to stay that way.

Now it seems that everyone is resting — the aggrieved student and her family and other Muslim students there have decided to act decidedly; the lies about the ‘Muslim father’s reluctance to educate his girl’ have been completely, fully, totally, busted; the awful smirk on the face of the motormouth of a headmistress, and the raucous hallelujah chorus that her lawyer and the media provided — as they fought their war against a thirteen-year-old and her headscarf — are being dissected and ridiculed; the ugly motives of the Christian fanatic who heads the school PTA are out in the public. But the rot runs deep, and this is the time to expose it. In the wake of the controversy, many Muslim commentators pointed out that the hatred of the Muslim headscarf is a silent epidemic in Kerala schools — in many schools, Muslim girls remove their headscarves before entering the school premises, and put them back when they step out.

Back to the question: why is hijabophobia the most common manifestation of Islamophobia in Kerala? Finding an answer to this probably calls for careful sociological, cultural, and indeed, psychological research. But for a start, the visibility of the distinctness of post-1990s Islam in Kerala — that of the hijab — is perhaps experienced as a threat. And it is also evident that Islamophobia is performative — it performs that hatred and thereby produces it; it is not just discursive. The irrational response that it triggers makes it impossible to communicate clearly with those gripped by such fear — that the hijab hardly means women’s confinement within domesticity, and more the opposite. A hijabi woman is found in public spaces — of education, politics, employment, out there, and not within a zenana. That is, the hijab hardly signifies the home-boundedness of the Muslim women, and in Kerala, its appearance co-relates with the mass entry of Muslim women into higher education. The sisters of the student against who the St Rita’s school waged its holy war — she is one of her parents’ four daughters — are studying abroad, in London and Russia, and her father has spoken openly of the large debts he has incurred for their education. If the Kerala government is serious about getting our educated, skilled women into the workforce, they’d better weed out such odious, suicidal nonsense against hijabi women.

Perhaps it is important to note that the pervasive liberal vilification of the hijab, of colonial origin, but gaining accelerated circulation in and through intensified globalisation and especially post- 9/11, may not fully explain Malayali hijabophobia. Indeed, there may be local factors. For instance, it is the religious veiling of Catholic women, which Malayalis historically familiar with, that is more closely associated with a celibate and restricted life. Or, the veiling and extreme seclusion imposed on Malayala brahmin women, which ended by mid-twentieth century. Somehow, these associations seem to be transferred on to Muslim women’s veiling. Maybe it is the psychological baggage of the twentieth century that is at the bottom of it (besides other sociological, cultural, and political-economic reasons).

Perhaps it is this transference that is at the bottom of our hijabophobia? This is only a hypothesis that can at best serve to open up further research investigations. Whatever be the reasons, however, the dire situation today is the result of the cynical use of such unconscious fears by pro-Hindutva Christian groups, who are beset by their own fears of extinction in India. In Kerala, dwindling numbers and growing migration among Syrian Christians have led to the targeting of the Malayali Muslim community as the major threat to Christians — through the ‘love jihad’ bogey through which they ‘outsource’ the policing of their community boundaries to violent Hindutva elements. They seem to be now projecting their own hidden psychological insecurities on the Muslims: even as they are attacked severely in northern India by violent Hindutva goons and blamed for proselytism, and targeted racially as ‘smelly Indians’ abroad, they appear to be trying to shake off the terror psychologically at least, by projecting these on their own brethren, the Malayali Muslims. Most importantly, many activists and spokespersons of the CAASA , judging from their public appearances, seen to be bitter, defeated Syrian Christian men, who seem unable to secure the upward mobility identified with that community.

The CAASA is hardly civil society — it is eminently uncivil and even deranged. Comparing it with the post-Babri Masjid Muslim political formations is definitely not correct. Those formations raised the prospect of alliances between oppressed Indian religious minorities and oppressed caste-groups; they exposed the religious-majoritarian underbellies of mainstream national political parties — and of capital, that rode on them. The CAASA’s insecurities are more imagined than real simply because the Syrian Catholic community from which most of its vociferous members hail from is one of the most powerful social groups in Kerala. It is worth remembering that even in the infamous ‘hand-chopping controversy’ around the terrible violence against a Christian-named rationalist professor, extremist elements among the Muslims were punishing not a Christian believer, but a rationalist who had allegedly disrespected Islam.

If the post-Babri Muslim minority and Dalit self-assertions rely on the Indian Constitution and the struggle for social equality to overcome their insecurities, the CAASA’s strategies are exactly the opposite — the denial of the Indian Constitution’s guarantees and pandering to Hindu majoritarianism. No wonder, they are called Chrisanghikal in Kerala — a new word in the Malayalam language, which means Christian hanger-ons to the Sangh. It is a thriving group, an avenue for many retired bureaucrats and police officers seeking ways to cling on to power, and avoid public scrutiny of their careers. And most importantly, the Muslim and Dalit formations on what may be called the oppositional civil society — as opposed to the Gramscian understanding of ‘traditional’ civil society, the religious and caste-based community movements of twentieth-century Kerala which were based on secularized caste and naturalized gender. The CAASA, however, is undoubtedly a perversion of these movements in which the ugliness of their power-bases is revealed fully.

As for women, both Muslim and Dalit formations in Kerala have opened the doors for women of these groups to enter higher education and public life in unprecedented numbers and ways — a development that belies the claims of Islamophobes. In contrast, the CAASA has been associated with pro-natalist calls that exhort women to turn themselves into baby-producing machines to increase the crude numbers of the Syrian Christian community. But it is important to note that not just CAASA, but also the older Nair Service Society and the Sreenarayana Dharma Paripalana Sangham have been been wallowing in imagined insecurities. The CAASA too has ties with sections of the Syrian Catholic clergy which claims the legacy of twentieth century modernisation of the community.

In other words, the highly competitive civil society that shaped Malayali politics in the past century seems to have rotted to its very core. Instead of community competition for development resources and upward mobility, it is the fear of each other and other imagined insecurities that drive it. The fear drives them to cut desperate deals, directly and indirectly, with majoritarian forces. All the more reason why oppositional civil society in Kerala — especially feminist voices and groups — needs to turn a critical self-reflexive eye on the lingering Islamophobia in their midst. Instead of hanging back on models of civil social activism of the past, there is a serious need to reimagine oppositional civil society for these climate-change affected, resource-depleted, highly iniquitous, psychological insecurity-infected, Hindutva-hegemonised times.

Political society, both the LDF and the UDF, have generally been busy trying to ingratiate itself with these rotting cores of social organisation, and so V Sivankutty’s act was indeed a courageous one — made possible probably by the fact that the issue originated from civil society, and not the state. The school, a social institution dependent on and subject to the rules set by the Kerala government, seemed to be offering defiance that was openly communal-political, and worse, its spokespersons exuded a confidence that relied on the support of majoritarian hate-mongers deeply infesting politics. If the school had kept its head down and relied on negotiation Hibi-Eden-style, it might have got away with its hateful act.

I can think of no other immediate cure than sending all these hate-mongers — including the school principal, her lawyer, the PTA head, the CAASA nutjobs, as well as the screechy Malayalam newscasters competing for moral high ground, the editors of the Deepika, and Hibi Eden as well — on a prayerful trip to the graveyard at Puthumala where the victims of the 2024 Wayanad landslide lie buried together. Let them see with their own eyes: in death, nothing matters. Cultural bullies were not somehow more secure than others when the hill and the waters rushed down and erased so many lives.

Maybe that is how we of the twenty-first century will finally dump the baggage of the past century. Even as this issue was being discussed, let us not forget, the eastern hilly district of Idukki in Kerala was ravaged by landslides and severe flooding.

Water, ultimately, may have to be our teacher — a sad, grim prospect. Let that not materialize.