CHENNAI, India (RNS) A court in northern India has sided with Sikh priests who denied medical school admission to a female student who had plucked her eyebrows, putting her in violation of the faith’s tenets that prohibit cutting one’s hair.
A three-judge “full bench” of the Punjab and Haryana High Court, in an order issued Saturday (May 30), said keeping unshorn hair was an essential and fundamental element of the Sikh religion, which is followed by 2 percent of India’s 1.1 billion population.
The Sikh student, Gurleen Kaur, and others challenged the denial of their admission into a medical school in Amritsar because they had plucked their eyebrows and trimmed their hair.
The medical school is one of several “minority institutions” throughout the country operated by the minority Islamic, Christian, Jain and Parsi faiths. The Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC), an influential Sikh governing body, had ruled that Kaur was not a “true Sikh as she was plucking her eyebrows.”
The high court said the requisite of maintaining Sikh “swarup,” or appearance, was a permissible precondition for admitting students under the Sikh minority quota system in various institutions.
The SGPC runs two medical colleges, two engineering institutes, 40 degree colleges and 150 schools, most of them in the northern Indian state of Punjab, where a large number of Sikhs live.
The court order held that the principle of retaining unshorn hair was meant not only for adults but also for minor children; the court said adults are required to attend to the maintenance of their children’s hair.
“We are happy with the judgment,” said Avtar Singh Makkar, chief of the SGPC. “Our stand that unshorn hair is of paramount importance for Sikhs has been vindicated.”