You Are the Judge Who Must Decide What Sukaina Can Wear to School

The Same Question, Asked From Opposite Directions

Two controversies, on paper, look like they belong to entirely different political tribes. Actor Kriti Sanon wears less in an ad and faces backlash from one direction, loud enough that the brand pulls the campaign. Student Sukaina Rizvi wants to wear more - a hijab alongside her uniform - and a court tells her no, because she couldn't prove the headscarf is theologically essential to Islam.

One woman is punished, informally, for exposing too much. The other is denied, formally, for choosing to cover. It would be easy to file these as unrelated stories about unrelated ideological camps. They aren't. They are the same question, asked from opposite directions: who gets to decide what a woman's body says.

The formal mechanism differs sharply between the two cases and that difference matters. Sanon's controversy played out entirely in the court of public and political opinion - outrage, defence, a company's commercial calculation, no law involved at any point.

Rizvi's case, by contrast, ran through an actual court, applying an actual legal doctrine: the Essential Religious Practices test, which asks judges to determine whether a given practice is fundamental enough to a religion to earn constitutional protection under Article 25.

That test has a long pedigree, tracing back to the Supreme Court's 1954 Shirur Mutt case and it sounds, on its face, like a careful, principled way to sort genuine religious claims from convenient ones. The trouble is what the test actually requires in practice: a secular court sitting in judgment on theology, deciding what real Islam demands, using evidence and argument about scripture rather than about the petitioner's own liberty.

That's a strange place for a constitutional democracy to have parked its protection for religious expression, because it makes the strength of someone's legal right depend on how persuasively they can argue a point of doctrine - not on whether the choice is genuinely theirs to make.

Compare that to the much simpler question a personal-liberty framework would ask instead: is the state or an institution acting under state authority, restricting this person's autonomy over her own body and expression and if so, is that restriction proportionate to a genuine, defensible institutional interest?

That test doesn't require anyone to certify what "real" Islam requires. It just asks whether Rizvi's liberty is being limited fairly - the same question that, if applied honestly, should also have governed how seriously anyone was entitled to treat Sanon's neckline as a matter of public concern in the first place.

Neither woman is asking the rest of us to agree with her choice. Mufti's own life offers a small, telling illustration of exactly this point: she once campaigned in a kurta churidar, found it uncomfortable in windy, watchful crowds and switched the next day to an abaya and headscarf - not because anyone forced either choice on her, but because she alone decided which clothing let her do her work.

That is what agency actually looks like in practice: not a uniform standard of how much or how little a woman should reveal, but the basic right to keep deciding, garment by garment, without needing anyone's permission, court order or theological proof first.