| PART 2: > When Macron bans the burqa, people default to it being for cultural preservation and safety. Macron did not introduce France’s public face-covering ban because the law was enacted in October 2010 [8]. Macron became president in 2017 [9]. It is formally a general prohibition on concealing the face in public, rather than a law that names only Muslim clothing, and the same legislation separately punishes forcing someone to conceal her face [8]. There can obviously be secular grounds for restricting face coverings in particular situations. Identity checks, examinations, courtrooms, secure buildings and circumstances in which someone is being coerced are all reasonable subjects for regulation. If a woman is being forced to wear a burqa or niqab, then punishing the coercer is entirely defensible. But that does not make every general prohibition unquestionably secular or liberal. The European Court of Human Rights upheld the French law [10], while the UN Human Rights Committee later found that France violated the religious freedom of two women whom it fined for wearing the niqab [11]. The Netherlands has a partial prohibition applying to public transport and government, healthcare and educational premises rather than an unrestricted ban in every public place [12]. European states therefore do not have one obvious consensus under which all burqa restrictions are merely neutral safety measures. Different countries regulate them differently, and major human-rights institutions have disagreed about the limits. You can defend a restriction on secular grounds, especially where identification or coercion is involved, without pretending that every restriction proves Europe has correctly diagnosed the nature of Islam. > Europe is a great example. The Muslim population of Europe is miniscule but Europeans are even more vitriolic against them than Indians. The fact that Europeans complain about Muslims does not prove every complaint is true, much less that the cause must be the "aggressive nature" of Islam. That is circular, Muslims are supposedly aggressive because people dislike them, and people’s dislike is then justified because Muslims are supposedly aggressive. Hostility towards a group cannot itself be used as proof that the group deserves hostility. Europe also involves a very different political question. A large part of its debate concerns recent migration, asylum and integration. Indian Muslims are not recently arrived foreigners asking a host population to tolerate them. They are citizens from communities that have lived in the subcontinent for centuries. Millions remained in India after Partition and had to define their citizenship and belonging within the Indian republic [14]. Immigration policy concerns who may enter and settle in a country. Constitutional equality concerns how a country treats citizens who already belong to it. Conflating the two rhetorically turns Indian Muslims into permanent immigrants whose rights depend on whether the majority presently finds their behaviour agreeable. > When the government tries to stop the streets from being filled with lambs blood, Indian Muslims complain that it’s discrimination. Slaughtering animals in public streets can be restricted on grounds of sanitation, or obstruction of public space. India’s prevention of cruelty to animals rules state that, within municipal areas, animals generally may not be slaughtered except in recognised or licensed slaughterhouses and set requirements involving veterinary examination, drainage and the collection of blood [15]. Apply those rules. I have no objection to that. But apply them as rules governing slaughter, sanitation and public space, not as evidence that one religion has an inherently aggressive nature. United States federal law expressly recognises slaughter performed according to Jewish or other religious ritual requirements as a legally humane method [16]. European Union law permits a religious rites exception from prior stunning requirements when the slaughter occurs in a slaughterhouse [17]. The British government publishes instructions for legally conducting halal and kosher slaughter without prior stunning [18]. And is animal sacrifice uniquely Muslim. Goats are sacrificed daily to Kali at Kalighat, and the Indian legal dispute there has included whether the practice should be prohibited, regulated or concealed from public view [19]. I am not arguing that Hinduism is therefore an aggressive religion, that inference would be as irrelevant as the one you are making about Islam. It shows that slaughter can exist within more than one religious tradition and can be regulated through neutral public health law, and maybe animal welfare. Practices change when institutions, and culture change and if public slaughter creates a health problem, regulate public slaughter. There is no need to transform a solvable civic problem into a theory about the unchangable nature of millions. The same applies to loudspeakers and the occupation of roads. Impose neutral limits on noise, hours, sanitation and obstruction, and apply them to mosques, temples, churches, political rallies, wedding processions and every other group. Article 25 itself subjects religious practice to public order, morality and health and allows the regulation of secular activity associated with religion [1]. What is not neutral is treating a Muslim violation as evidence about Islam’s aggressive essence while treating similar majority practices as ordinary Indian culture. India has no shortage of temple loudspeakers, processions, road occupations, public animal sacrifice or politically protected religious gatherings. This is the same special pleading that existed in your previous response. Hindutva is granted history, fear, political incentives, trauma and provocation. Muslim conduct is reduced to “the aggressive nature of the religion”. Indian Jews are treated as comparable to a population thousands of times larger when that helps your argument, while their mass migration to Israel is ignored. Your experiences at an American college become evidence about Indian Muslims, while sourced descriptions of Indian politics are dismissed as Western misunderstanding. And after all of this, you still do not answer the original causal claim. None of the material about triple talaq, Waqf property, burqas, loudspeakers or animal slaughter establishes that Bangladeshi distrust of India is mainly religious. None of it converts Savarkar’s articulated political ideology into a merely defensive reflex. It is a collection of grievances about Muslims being used to avoid defending the propositions that were actually challenged. [8]: https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/jorf/id/JORFTEXT000022911670
[9]: https://www.elysee.fr/en/emmanuel-macron
[10]: https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng?i=002-9952
[11]: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2018/10/france-banni...
[12]: https://www.government.nl/faq/ban-on-face-coverings/what-doe...
[13]: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2017/11/29/europes-grow...
[14]: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/muslim-belonging-in-sec...
[15]: https://www.dahd.gov.in/sites/default/files/2026-05/SLAUGHTE...
[16]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/7/1902
[17]: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2009/1099/oj/eng
[18]: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/halal-and-kosher-slaughter
[19]: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-law-and-r... |