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TheKarnataka government’s decision last week to withdraw the 2022 order of the previous Bharatiya Janata Party government that effectively prohibited hijab in pre-university colleges has been viewed as a constitutional correction. Yet, the withdrawal also exposes a difficult truth: constitutional injuries do not disappear merely because the state retracts a notification.

For the Muslim women who lost years of education and were forced to abandon their academic aspirations because they refused to remove the hijab, the reversal comes after significant damage has already been done, especially in terms of lost educational and professional opportunities.

Thetestimonies of students such as Aliya Assadi, AH Almast, Resham Farook and Muskan Zainab, who challenged the ban in court, demonstrate that the hijab controversy was never a narrow dispute over uniforms. It was fundamentally about whether constitutional citizenship in India permits visible minority identity in public educational spaces.

The answer offered by the state four years ago was deeply troubling: inclusion would be conditional upon conformity.