In the debate about what Indian women should wear, the word “choice” has become a kind of closing argument. However, the concept of choice holds true only when it applies in both directions. A woman should have the freedom to cover herself, but she must also have the equal freedom not to. When only one of these freedoms is present in practice, the term “choice” no longer reflects true autonomy.
Two recent controversies have brought this tension into sharp focus. Actor Kriti Sanon was trolled after appearing in a jewellery advertisement around Raksha Bandhan. Separately, a student named Sukaina Rizvi lost her case in the Allahabad High Court after seeking permission to wear a hijab along with her school uniform at a CBSE-affiliated school in Prayagraj. The court held that wearing a headscarf is not an essential religious practice in Islam, citing the Karnataka High Court’s March 2022 reasoning and noting that other Muslim girls at the same school wore the prescribed uniform without complaint.
Writing in The Indian Express under the headline “Kriti Sanon and Sukaina Rizvi, a ‘bikini’ or a hijab – what matters is her choice,” former Jammu & Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti placed these two episodes side by side and framed them as instances of a single patriarchal instinct to control what women wear.
This framing falls apart once you look at the consequences each woman actually faces.
Sanon was criticised online. But her career, her mobility, and her daily life remained entirely unchanged. Now consider what happens to a girl in a conservative Muslim household who decides, on her own, that she does not want to wear the hijab. In most communities where the hijab is the norm, her decision would be treated as a rejection of faith. The consequences range from domestic conflict and social isolation to damaged marriage prospects and, in certain settings, even threats of outright violence.
This is the gap at the heart of Mufti’s argument. She treats the hijab as though it exists in a vacuum of pure individual choice, when the lived experience of millions of women tells a very different story. The freedom to wear the hijab and the freedom to refuse it do not carry equal weight in practice. One is supported by the full apparatus of family, community, and religious authority. While the other is punished by it.
We do not have to construct hypotheticals here. In Iran, 22-year-old Mahsa Amini was arrested in September 2022 by the morality police for not wearing her hijab according to state-prescribed standards. She died in custody three days later. The protests that erupted under the banner of “Woman, Life, Freedom” lasted over a hundred days. More than 500 people were killed and over 22,000 detained. The Iranian government has since doubled down, deploying facial recognition to track women who appear without headscarves, confiscating vehicles, and pushing legislation that would impose up to three years in prison for non-compliance.
In Afghanistan, a Taliban decree from August 2024 requires women to cover their bodies and faces entirely in public. Girls have been barred from school beyond the sixth grade since 2022. As of December 2024, women were banned from medical institutions as well.
These are extreme cases, and it would be unfair to equate India with Iran or Afghanistan. But the enforcement does not require a morality police to be effective. Within India, the pressure on Muslim women operates through the weight of religious expectation.
Religious institutions reinforce these norms with formal authority. The Darul Uloom Deoband, one of India’s most influential Islamic seminaries, carries fatwas on its website advising families that women’s clothing must not reveal the ‘size and contours’ of the body, even in a school setting. In May 2026, Samastha, a prominent Islamic body in Kerala, issued a directive that Muslim girls must not sing, must wear the hijab, and must not shake hands with men, warning that deviation from these norms could invite divine retribution. In Assam, in March 2017, 46 clerics issued a fatwa against Nahid Afrin, a 16-year-old Indian Idol Junior finalist, banning her from performing publicly and calling music “against Sharia.”
Even the “choice” to wear the hijab is not always what it appears. During the Udupi hijab row in Karnataka in 2022, the Government PU College for Girls told the High Court that the Campus Front of India, the student wing of the now-banned Popular Front of India, which had plans of turning India into an Islamic state, had instigated six girls to start wearing the hijab to class.
The pattern of control extends well beyond clothing. When Shayara Bano challenged the practice of instant triple talaq before the Supreme Court in February 2016, the All India Muslim Personal Law Board argued in its own affidavit that triple talaq aligned with Shariat law.
Mufti is unlikely to endorse any of this. But her column’s logic moves in the same direction. By refusing to distinguish between the social media trolling of a Bollywood actress and the institutional and communal enforcement of a dress code rooted in patriarchal religious authority, she collapses a distinction that matters enormously.
The Allahabad High Court’s reasoning in the Rizvi case followed the Karnataka High Court’s 2022 full bench decision, which applied the essential religious practices test and concluded that wearing the hijab does not meet the threshold. The Allahabad bench further noted that Rizvi had herself signed an undertaking to follow school discipline at the time of admission. There is nothing unreasonable about expecting students in a shared educational space to follow a common dress code. Treating such policies as an attack on religious freedom misconstrues both the purpose of uniforms and the nature of the right being claimed.
Mufti’s column contains a line that captures its own blind spot. She writes that a woman’s clothing has become “a measure of her morality, character, religion or loyalty to a particular culture.” She means this as an indictment of those who police women’s choices. But within the very communities she claims to speak for, the hijab functions exactly this way. It is the marker by which a woman’s piety and her family’s standing are judged. A woman who removes it is viewed as committing a moral transgression, in the eyes of her community.
If we are serious about women’s autonomy over their own bodies, we have to hold this argument from both ends. We have to challenge those who police women for what they wear and, with the same conviction, stand beside those girls who want to walk out of their house without the hijab. Mufti’s column manages only the first half of this. That tells you more about its politics than its feminism.
