Allahabad High Court earlier this week, dismissed a Muslim student’s plea to wear a hijab with her school uniform, holding that she failed to prove the headscarf was an “essential religious practice” of Islam. The facts are simple enough: a girl in Prayagraj wore a scarf from Class VI without objection, was denied it on returning for Class XI, and lost her case because a court decided she hadn’t cited enough scripture to justify it.
But the real story isn’t in what the judgment says. It’s in the question the court asked in the first place, and why that question should never have been asked at all.
A test built for something else
Article 25 of the Constitution protects the freedom to practise religion. It does not say a person must first prove a practice is theologically mandatory before that freedom applies. That requirement, the “essential religious practices” test, was invented by the Supreme Court in 1954. Since the Karnataka hijab litigation in 2022, courts have used the same test to decide whether an individual student can wear a scarf to class. That is not what essentiality was built for. A teenage girl is not a temple trust claiming religious sanction to exclude people. She is asking to keep wearing what she has always worn.
And yet the Allahabad court held her petition failed because she offered no “authoritative religious text” proving the headscarf was obligatory, as though a sixteen-year-old should arrive in court armed with citations from competing schools of Islamic jurisprudence just to keep her education. No Sikh student is asked to produce scripture to justify a turban. The burden falls only where courts have decided, in advance, that it should.
The Supreme Court hasn’t actually decided this
What the Allahabad judgment doesn’t dwell on, but should have, is how unsettled this question still is. When the Karnataka verdict reached the Supreme Court in Aishat Shifa v. State of Karnataka, the two-judge bench split. Justice Hemant Gupta upheld the ban. Justice Sudhanshu Dhulia struck it down, warning that forcing a girl to choose between her headscarf and her education risks losing her to the system altogether, a far graver harm than any threat to classroom uniformity.
That split has never been resolved. It was referred to a larger bench more than three years ago, and no such bench has been constituted. In the meantime, high courts keep citing Karnataka’s ruling as “persuasive authority,” as Allahabad did this week, quietly converting a genuinely divided question into settled law, one dismissed petition at a time, without the Supreme Court ever actually settling it.
“Uniform” is doing a lot of work
The judgment rests heavily on the idea that a dress code applied to everyone equally cannot be discriminatory. But a rule doesn’t become neutral just because it’s written in neutral language. A ban on headscarves does not fall on every student the way a rule about shoe colour would. It falls, predictably and only, on Muslim girls. Treating that as equivalent to ordinary uniform enforcement mistakes formal sameness for actual fairness, and Indian constitutional law has never accepted that substitution anywhere else.
What this actually costs
Justice Dhulia’s dissent named the real stakes plainly: whether a Muslim girl is made to choose between her faith and her classroom. Every ruling like Allahabad’s narrows that choice a little further. And the girls most likely to be pushed out first are not the ones in elite institutions with the resources to litigate for years; they are ordinary students in ordinary schools, exactly like the one in this case, for whom “prove your theology or lose your seat” isn’t a legal abstraction. It’s Tuesday.
There was a narrower path available here: ask whether a scarf in the uniform’s own colour genuinely disrupts discipline or identification, and if not, accommodate it. That question doesn’t require a judge to adjudicate Islamic doctrine at all. But Indian courts keep reaching for essentiality instead, because it lets them dispose of the case without asking whether the rule was proportionate in the first place.
Until the Supreme Court finally constitutes the bench it promised three years ago, that question will keep landing on the desks of high courts, decided again and again by a test that was never meant to decide it.
(This is an opinion piece. The views expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of FoEJ Media, which neither endorses nor assumes responsibility for them.)
