Will reverberations of hijab controversy be felt in poll-bound UP?

What is at the heart of the row over the sartorial choice of a few college girls in Karnataka? How come attention went to their headscarves so abruptly? Does this have something to do with the electoral battle in Uttar Pradesh? For answers, one has to look beyond TV debates – especially when they obfuscate fair, rational and wise political choices that an election can offer to the people.

The decision to shut down schools and colleges in Karnataka due to the recent controversy over the hijab coincided with the end of canvassing for the first phase of polls in UP. 

On Thursday (February 10), 58 out of the 403 assembly constituencies will vote for their representatives.  Most of these are far more febrile than Udupi or other towns of the southern state. The hotspots of ethnic and communal strife are spread throughout western UP – right from the gates of Delhi to cover no less than 11 districts, including Meerut, Mathura, Agra and Aligarh.

The last of them is a large and bustling educational hub too. It has Aligarh Muslim University, besides myriad other institutions catering to tens of thousands of young learners. The kerfuffle in Karnataka can have hardly gone unnoticed in Aligarh. The town and its neighbourhoods have a reputation of being communally more sensitive compared to other areas going to polls in the first, and even subsequent six, phases.

The sprawling district with its seven assembly segments has a fair share of Muslims. Despite this, the BJP won all seven in the Vidhan Sabha polls five years ago. 

The party is hoping to once again retain these seats. Last September Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation stone of a state university campus spread across 92 acres at Lodha and Musepur Kareem Jarouli villages of Aligarh’s Kol Tehsil.

The new university is named after Raja Mahinder Pratap Singh, a Jat royal who ruled a small principality called Mursan. Singh was an alumnus of the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, which evolved into AMU. What is more ironic is that the raja had founded a government-in-exile with a few Muslim compatriots in Kabul to fight the British for freedom. He also donated land for the Aligarh College. He fought the Lok Sabha polls in 1957 as an independent candidate from Mathura and defeated, among others, Jana Sangh’s Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who came fourth in the hustings.

None of these facts has deterred the BJP from resurrecting the long-lamented raja – electoral expediency warrants such an ‘out-of-the-box’ move. Against this backdrop, the relentless focus on the hijab controversy looks shadier than ever.

If the BJP was keen on the raja to assuage Jat farmers’ anger over farm laws, it is now trying to duck the Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi’s salvo. She has been talking about women’s empowerment in the run-up to the polls. Inspired by their sisters in Karnataka, will enough Muslim women turn out to vote?

The Congress may not be a force to reckon with in Uttar Pradesh, but the party and its leaders, or mainly Priyanka, have broken the virtual siege that politics came under during Yogi Adityanath’s iron-fisted rule. The way she and her brother, Rahul Gandhi, broke through human walls formed by policemen in October 2020 at the CM’s behest to reach the parents of Hathras rape and murder victim served as a wake-up call to the opposition.

Similarly, the party’s actions in Lakhimpur Kheri in the wake of the murder of the farmers, allegedly by the son of a Union minister of state, further weakened BJP’s grip. The BJP today faces a stiff challenge from regional satraps.

One seat the Congress could win is Kol, near Aligarh, where the new university will be built. It is from here that the Congress candidate and former Vidhan Sabha and also Vidhan Parishad member Vivek Bansal is trying his luck. The institution is coming up amid the hijab controversy. Its reverberations are being felt not just in Karnataka campuses, but also far away in UP.

The writer is an independent journalist based in Delhi and NCR. He tweets @abidshahjourno