Nitish’s hand on a veil
By: Jameel Ahmad Milansaar
On 15 December 2025, in Patna’s Samvad Hall, Bihar’s long-time mascot of “social justice”, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, presided over what should have been a routine government ceremony. Instead, it turned into a spectacle in which a young woman’s dignity was peeled away with the casualness of a man flicking dust off his sleeve.
On the agenda was the distribution of appointment letters to 1,283 AYUSH doctors — 685 Ayurveda, 393 homoeopathy and 205 Unani practitioners. It was meant to be an afternoon of speeches, handshakes and polite applause; a bureaucratic ritual to inaugurate new jobs.
Then a name was called: Dr Nusrat Parveen, Unani medicine.
She walked up to the stage. Her face was covered with a hijab.
Nitish Kumar saw her. Something in his expression tightened. He gestured towards her headscarf, not with curiosity but with irritation, and asked, “What is this?” Before the hall, or even the young doctor herself, could process the question, the Chief Minister of Bihar bent forward from the podium, reached out, and with his own hand pulled her hijab down.
In one brief movement, a woman who had cleared competitive examinations and earned the white coat of a doctor was stripped of her most basic sense of security. In the very hall where her competence was to be recognised, her body was turned into a site of power. In the now viral video, Deputy Chief Minister Samrat Choudhary can be seen instinctively trying to restrain Nitish’s hand. Political reflex arrived a second too late. The hijab was gone. The insult was complete.
To dismiss this as the eccentricity of an ageing politician is to pretend not to understand what is on the screen. This is not just one man’s lapse; it is a system showing its face.
Listen to the audio of that clip: a ripple of subdued laughter, scattered clapping, the low hum that so often accompanies authority in India. At the centre of it stands a visibly uncomfortable young Muslim woman, frozen in a moment she did not choose.
Together, image and sound offer a blunt message. In a majoritarian common sense that has been slowly normalised, the Muslim woman’s modesty is no longer read as a matter of personal conviction. It is treated as a prop — something the powerful may tug at, remove, interrogate, and then be faintly amused by the discomfort that follows.
Opposition parties reacted along expected lines. Rashtriya Janata Dal leaders questioned whether Nitish Kumar was “in control”, using the incident to highlight what they called his unstable behaviour. Congress figures termed the act “cheap” and “public harassment” and demanded his resignation. But to stop at the question of whether one man should vacate one post is to miss the scale of what happened.
What unfolded on that stage was also a confession — an unguarded admission by a whole tribe of self-described “secular” and “liberal” politicians who have worn Muslim votes like a badge while quietly absorbing the prejudices of the majority.
The irony, in this case, writes itself. In 2022, when the hijab controversy raged in Karnataka, Nitish Kumar dismissed it as a “non-issue” for Bihar and assured that his government respected religious sentiments and did not interfere in people’s ways of life. Three years later, that same hand is on the face of a Muslim woman, on the cloth she has chosen to wear, on the border between her self and the public gaze.
If you were looking for a working definition of double standards, you could do worse than replay that video.
For years, Nitish Kumar has polished his image with the glow of girls’ cycle schemes, scholarships, earnest speeches on women’s education and the rhetoric of “sushasan” — good governance. In a single gesture, the carefully curated portrait buckled. Bihar’s Muslims — a little over 17 per cent of the State’s population — continue to fare poorly on most educational and economic indicators, even as they are courted as a decisive vote bank. They are welcomed at the polling booth but rarely at the table.
When a Chief Minister, in full view of cameras, feels entitled to reach out and pluck away a woman’s hijab at a government function, he is not merely humiliating an individual. He is addressing an entire community: your honour, your symbols, your faith-coloured habits survive only on the terms we set.
For Bihar’s Muslims, anger is the easiest part of the response. Outrage travels fast — through forwards, late-night television debates, the brief blaze of hashtags. Necessary, certainly; sufficient, certainly not.
This is the sort of wound that demands structure.
Wherever the State, or those who wield its authority, claim the right to touch, alter or strip away what a woman wears as an expression of her belief, the old politics of “adjustment” has to end.
Yet, even within this dark frame, there is the possibility of a different kind of beginning.
If the Muslims of Bihar refuse to file this away as just another passing scandal, that single tug at a hijab can redraw more than one line. Politically, a more self-aware and cohesive Muslim vote — one that turns away from alliances that normalise humiliation — could alter Bihar’s arithmetic of power. Socially, if the name “Nusrat Parveen” travels into homes, classrooms and clinics, it may catalyse legal aid cells, protection networks and forums where Muslim women speak in their own voices about what they endure and what they refuse to accept. Ethically, for a generation fragmented by caste, sect and party, a united and principled stand could send a simple message: some things are not for sale.
Those inclined to shrug this off as a minor controversy over a piece of cloth would do well to remember a basic truth about power: once it learns that it can lay hands on symbols without consequence, it rarely stops at symbols. Today, it is the hijab. Tomorrow, it will be the beard, the call to prayer, the right to live one’s faith in public.
If there is clarity and resolve now, that afternoon in Samvad Hall — a Chief Minister bending from his podium to pull down a young doctor’s hijab — may yet be remembered as more than an insult. It may mark the moment when one man’s stature began to shrink, and a long-battered minority in Bihar began, quietly but firmly, to stand a little taller.
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