To Indian lawyers with or without hijab
See below & ny const art sec 3
Stop scratching on holidays
Published: June 1, 2012
Off Track Betting in New York State has been racing into a crisis called shrinking revenue. Some people have spitballed a solution: Don’t close on holidays.
New York State Racing Law bars racing on Christmas, Easter and Palm Sunday, and the state has ruled OTBs can’t handle action on those days, even though they could easily broadcast races from out of state.
“You should be able to bet whenever you want,” said Jackson Leeds, a Nassau OTB employee who makes an occasional bet. He added some irrefutable logic: “How is the business going to make money if you’re not open to take people’s bets?”
Elias Tsekerides, president of the Federation of Hellenic Societies of Greater New York, said OTB is open on Greek Orthodox Easter and Palm Sunday.
“I don’t want discrimination,” Tsekerides said. “They close for the Catholics, but open for the Greek Orthodox? It’s either open for all or not open.”
OTB officials have said they lose millions by closing on Palm Sunday alone, with tracks such as Gulfstream, Santa Anita, Turf Paradise and Hawthorne running.
One option: OTBs could just stay open and face the consequences. New York City OTB did just that back in 2003. The handle was about $1.5 million – and OTB was fined $5,000.
Easy money.
India’s Hijab Debate Is Both Nuanced and Nasty
Headscarf bans are a fraught topic, but it’s hard to argue Modi is merely pushing secularism.
Police stand guard as students enter a school in Bangalore, Feb. 16.
PHOTO: MANJUNATH KIRAN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
For almost 20 years, Western Europeans have wrestled with the fraught question of whether headscarves and other forms of Islamic attire should be tolerated or curbed. Now India is caught up in the same debate.
Indian courts will soon determine whether government schools have the authority to ban the hijab, the Islamic headscarf. At 200 million, India’s Muslim population is the world’s second-largest, after Indonesia’s—roughly as many Muslims as Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia combined. The courts’ decisions will influence the debate about the hijab’s acceptability in public spaces in other nations with Muslim minorities.
The current controversy began in January, when the parents of six Muslim girls petitioned a junior college—the equivalent of a U.S. high school—in the southern state of Karnataka to allow their daughters to wear headscarves in the classroom. As the issue spread to other schools, the state government, led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, stepped in with a ban in government educational institutions on clothing that “disturbs equality, integrity and public law and order.” Since then hijab-wearing girls and women have been barred from attending classes at some institutions and denied entry altogether to others.
The regulations have sparked protests across India and stirred a wider debate about the place of Islamic clothing in a Hindu-majority but ostensibly secular nation. With their typical gift for understatement, Indian TV news channels have promoted prime time debates on the issue with hashtags like #NoHijabDay and #HijabAmbushPlot. In several places in Karnataka, stone-throwing protesters clashed with baton-wielding police. Students as far apart as Delhi, Maharashtra and West Bengal have taken to the streets in favor of the right to wear the hijab. Others have mobilized against it, including Hindu students who wore saffron scarves—the color of Hinduism—as a counterprotest. Last week, the Karnataka government closed all schools for three days to quell tensions.
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The protests in India have received international attention. “Refusing to let girls go to school in their hijabs is horrifying,” tweeted the Pakistani Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai, whom the Taliban shot in the head 10 years ago for championing female education. French soccer player Paul Pogba, former tennis champion Martina Navratilova and Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi have all chimed in with criticism of Hindu nationalists who back the ban.
The Biden administration waded in as well. “Religious freedom includes the ability to choose one’s religious attire,” tweeted Rashad Hussain, the State Department’s ambassador for religious freedom. “Hijab bans in schools violate religious freedom and stigmatize and marginalize women and girls.”
For opponents of a ban, the argument is straightforward: It violates both religious liberty and individual rights. If some Muslim girls believe their faith mandates that they cover their heads, they should have the right to wear the hijab without being denied an education. In the U.S., prominent hijab-wearing activists such as Dalia Mogahed and Linda Sarsour have long portrayed the hijab as a garment that allows women to be judged for their minds rather than their looks. For others, donning the hijab is an act of resistance against anti-Muslim bigotry. Their counterparts in India make similar arguments.
For hijab skeptics the issue isn’t quite as simple. They say the garment promotes an in-your-face religiosity and fosters a sense of separateness among Muslims. In their view, the headscarf represents the oppression of women, not female empowerment. Hijab proponents often place the burden of sexual morality on women rather than men. Hijab apologists have likened a woman who chooses not to cover up to an unwrapped lollipop that attracts flies or a piece of meat left out for scavenging cats. The same Western liberals who defend the hijab decry other faiths when they treat female modesty this way.
Most Western commentators miss an important nuance about Muslim women’s dress, Sarah Haider, a Pakistani-American activist and writer, points out. “The hijab isn’t just a physical manifestation of Islam,” she said in a recent YouTube video. “It is a physical manifestation of conservative Islam.” Around the world those who promote the hijab most ardently—often using liberal arguments rooted in the freedom to choose—are Islamists who hold decidedly illiberal views. The scholar Cheryl Benard
In India, the rise of Hindu nationalism under Prime Minister Narendra Modi makes the debate even more charged. Since 2014, state governments led by the BJP have passed a raft of laws that critics say target Muslims. These include draconian penalties for eating beef or encouraging a spouse to convert from Hinduism to Islam, and a citizenship law that pointedly allowed only non-Muslims from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh to apply for fast-track naturalization. Mobs have lynched Muslims accused of killing cows and driven Muslim vendors out of Hindu neighborhoods, and extremist Hindu religious leaders have called for violence against the Indian Muslim community. On pro-government TV channels, Hindu nationalists constantly berate Muslims for the alleged crimes of medieval Islamic rulers.
When Mr. Modi himself has conducted Hindu prayers on television, the idea that his government or party are interested in French-style secularism is laughable. It comes across as another attempt to browbeat the Muslim minority. Indians have every right not to like the hijab. But a ban will rightly be seen as another step in the country’s slide toward illiberalism.
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