Two second PU students from Government PU College in Udupi who had petitioned the Karnataka High Court to allow hijab inside the classrooms returned on Friday without writing the exam after they were denied permission to enter the examination hall wearing their hijabs.
The exam which began on Friday will go on till May 18. The first paper was Business Studies. Over 6.84 lakh students will write the exam at 1,076 centres across the state.
Aliya Assadi and Resham, both from the commerce stream, had collected their hall tickets from the Government PU College in Udupi in the morning and went to Vidyodaya PU College in Udupi to write their exams.
They insisted that they should be allowed to write the exam wearing hijab but the college authorities citing the High Court order denied them entry. Subsequently, the girls returned home.
The lecturers, including the invigilators, tried to persuade the students to write the exam after removing their headscarves till 10.45 am. The students reportedly informed the lecturers that they will not write their exams without headscarves. Since they refused to remove their headscarves before the final bell rang for the commencement of the exam, they were denied permission. Following this, they left the premises teary-eyed.
On January 1, six girl students of a college in Udupi attended a press conference held by the Campus Front of India (CFI) in the coastal town protesting against the college authorities denying them entry into classrooms wearing headscarves.
This was four days after they requested the principal permission to wear hijab in classes which was not allowed. Till then, students used to wear the headscarf to the campus, but entered the classroom after removing it, college principal Rudre Gowda had said.
The reason was that the Hindu girls started coming to the college wearing saffron scarves to protest the permission granted to Muslim girls to violate the college uniform.
The matter snowballed into a major controversy as it spread to other parts of the state compelling the government to shut the college for a week in February.
The girls then approached the Karnataka High Court against the ban. The full bench of the high court comprising Chief Justice Ritu Raj Awasthi dismissed their petition saying that the hijab is not an essential religious practice and upheld the government order banning hijab and any cloth that could disturb peace, harmony and public order.
(With agency inputs)
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