The slippery slope fallacy

The Hijab Issue

In his celebrated work, The Open Society and its Enemies, the philosopher Karl Popper introduces the ‘paradox of tolerance’. The paradox is important in the discussion of what, if any, boundaries are to be set on personal freedoms in public places and institutions. The question of whether there is need for a dress code in educational institutions has been pushed to the forefront with the hijab controversy, and risks spilling over to other arenas. At the outset, we must recognise that this has little to do with freedoms or education or religion. This is a contestation that is retrograde on both sides. The contestation is primarily political, being orchestrated by power politics; the students and teachers reduced to mere pawns in the game.

A sense of urgency must inform the resolution of a more basic question: resolving conflicting views on practices and symbols at the intersection of the private and the public. Religious piety, beliefs and practices are a private matter and not for display in spaces shared by a plural public.

Increasingly, India is a mute witness to the appropriation of public spaces by religious symbolism or the appropriation of the public institutions by what are intrinsically private practices of piety or religious beliefs that must remain within the confines of one’s home or in private places. When right-wing religious symbolism -- regardless of the religion it represents -- manifests, it compromises the tolerant public.

Intolerance manifests when a tolerant person is faced with choosing between a positive relationship with a tolerant individual of a dissimilar out-group and a positive relationship with an intolerant in-group member. In the first case, the out-group relationship is disapproved of by the intolerant in-group member. In the second case, the negative relationship toward the out-group individual is endorsed by the intolerant in-group member. Thus, tolerant group members face being ostracised for their toleration by intolerant members of their in-group, or, in the alternative, being rewarded for demonstrating their out-group intolerance to intolerant members of their in-group.

Turkey’s experience with the hijab and the party that championed its ‘liberation’ presents a direct parallel to the current situation in India: Headscarves and religious garb of all kinds were discouraged by Kamal Ataturk, the maker of modern Turkey starting from the establishment of the Turkish Republic. In that early stage in the 1920s and 30s, there weren’t a significant number of headscarves in universities. Headscarf-wearing students began to appear in universities in larger numbers in the 1960s. Following the 1980 military coup, a new regulation (Regulation on the Dress of Personnel Working in Public Institutions and Organisations) specified that women’s heads must always be left uncovered in public — effectively a ban on hijab in universities and other public spaces. A second wave of attempts kicked off in 1997-98, with universities across Turkey, led by Istanbul University, banning the headscarf. The latest party to attempt to overturn this ban and allow more overt religiosity in public was the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, which has ruled since 2003, led by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. This resulted in the ban ending by law in 2013, due to the retrograde steps of the AKP.

Public spaces in India are always at risk of being occupied and eventually taken over by religious institutions and movements. Illegal construction on government land happens frequently in India. How many have not seen instances of a wall on a sidewalk go from empty to hosting a small idol, graduating to hosting a larger idol and altar, soon becoming a small temple, to a sizable concrete structure — a full-fledged temple complete with priests and devotees, all while appropriating what was previously meant to be a sidewalk for citizens to walk on. The instance that I cite happened near Khan Market in New Delhi in the 1990s, but it’s just one of many across the country.

A similar effect can happen when overt religiosity is introduced into institutions of learning or other public spaces. Get a critical mass of students all wearing a particular religious identifier into a common space and you begin to make non-religious students uncomfortable. They will leave and begin to avoid that public space, which could be a study room, a particular corridor, a wing of a building, a lawn, etc. When the concentration of students exhibiting overt religiosity grows, the more the chances that the unaffiliated ones will avoid that space. Until one day one realises that what used to be a public space for all students has turned into a restricted space where only members that demonstrate ostentatiously that they adhere to a specific faith are welcome. And because there was no one moment when that space was overtly claimed, it’s difficult to push back against this. But the effect is the same.

The only way to nip this in the bud is to disallow overt religious symbols of all religions in public universities and prescribe standards for all to follow. The uniform that all of us have worn at some time or the other disconnects two different ideas often sought to be conflated: private identity and public belonging. The humble uniform that schoolchildren wear -- and the time has come for colleges to prescribe them too -- does precisely that: the uniform eliminates identities of religion, caste, rich and poor; and identifies you for who you are – a student – and establishes that sense of belonging to the public institution you belong to – the college. It makes all equal -- the rule of law.

We must heed the advice of Karl Popper. It’s not just about the hijab or the saffron shawl; it never is with political Islam or Hindutva. If we fail, we risk the slippery slope fallacy — retrograde, reactionary and vestigial.

(The writer is Director, Public
Affairs Centre)