Dear reader, Nearly a week after results of five assembly elections, including in UP, were declared, the Karnataka High Court ruled in favour of the restrictions imposed by the state on wearing a headscarf in educational institutions. The Indian Express editorial ('A flawed justice', March 16) called it a "deeply flawed ruling". The court upheld a Karnataka government notification issued on February 5 that, effectively, allowed colleges to ban the hijab in the interest of public order, unity and integrity of the country, on the ground that the hijab did not pass the essential religious practices test. The editorial said, "The determination of whether a practice is essential to a religion calls for a more wide-ranging debate, including on the role of courts in deciding what is intrinsic to a faith, and on the limits of its applicability as a criterion to decide questions of basic human rights." It also said the court "failed to address adequately" the subject of "discrimination in public spaces, the individual's right to choose and the proportionality of restrictions that the state can impose." The editorial pointed out: "This case required a fine-grained discussion on autonomy, accommodation, and the limits of law in a multi-religious country. The ruling short-circuits it by equating schools to prisons, courts, war rooms and defence camps, and clubbing them together as 'qualified public spaces'. In these spaces, the court says, fundamental rights - such as equality, dignity and privacy - are relegated to mere derivative rights that deserve lesser protection of law. The evident overreach of the government order is dismissed as poor draftsmanship and the Court jumps to the defence of the draftsmen, urging the petitioners to not attribute literal meaning or attach constitutional significance to the words used. But those words are consequential, and their implications disturbing." In his essay ('A narrowing of freedom', March 16), Faizan Mustafa flagged the fact the Karnataka HC did not make any "reference whatsoever to the acceptance of review of the Sabarimala judgment (2018) and framing of seven questions by the seven-judge bench of the Supreme Court". He argued that "the Sabarimala review (2020) clearly shows that the Supreme Court itself is in doubt about the correctness of the essentiality doctrine and should courts really assume the role of clergy". Mustafa also pointed out that the Karnataka judgment has privileged "discipline and control over liberty and diversity". Mustafa has also traced the emergence and evolution of the essential practices test by analysing various judgments, beginning from Shirur Mutt (1954), to argue that the "doctrine is erroneous and gives courts extremely wide powers in purely theological matters". Another article on the issue by Zakir Soman ('Much ado about attire', March 18), argued that the issue that matters is not hijab but the education of Muslim girls. All girls must be in school, with or without hijab, she wrote. "They (governments) must not waste public resources and precious judicial hours on fighting legal cases to deny students their choice of attire in the name of uniform," she argued. The HC order is set to be challenged in the SC. The point, however, is that this is a manufactured controversy. The intent has been to polarise society on communal lines. Now, the court judgment had added a further twist to the debate by invoking the essential practices doctrine, which in effect could produce monolithic religious communities, with judges, without intention perhaps, in the chair of clergy. A section among Muslims have favoured the use of hijab and all these years, public institutions such as schools, allowed them by including them in the "uniform" - a scarf that matched the colour of the skirt or the shirt was the preferred middle ground. Indian secularism has preferred such accommodation with faith-related practices and customs than to insist on any hard separation between the secular and religious domains. In a country of diverse faiths and social practices, where even religious communities stand out for their diversity of customs and traditions, accommodation is key to avoiding inter and intra communal strife. Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine continues with Russia in no mood to heed the dominant global opinion against its murderous action. The US, in light of its immoral record as a global policeman, lacks the credibility to provide any moral leadership to the anti-war efforts. Vladimir Putin's moment of reckoning may come when the ordinary Russian revolts against the war. Peter Ronald deSouza ('Shooting Kafka in Kyiv', March 18) reads a moral fable in a confrontation between a Kalashnikov-wielding Russian soldier and a Ukrainian woman carrying sunflower seeds. The defiance of ordinary people, armed with little more than self-respect to challenge the might of Moscow, has already marked out Putin's place in history. As Yoginder Alagh ('Prague Spring, Kyiv Winter', March 16) recalled, the Russians have been here before. The lessons of Hungary, 1956 and Prague, 1968, or Afghanistan in the 1970s, have been forgotten. If these were to be ignored, there are America's crimes in Latin America, West Asia, Vietnam, and Afghanistan, of course, to learn from. Thank you, Amrith | 
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