French police have arrested two veiled women for violating the law banning wearing of burkha in public.
France is the latest to join the club of countries like Saudi Arabia,which believe that the state has the right to decide what its citizens should or should not wear. In recent years the whole of Europe is increasingly becoming an intolerant society,much like it was just few centuries back. However, this time its not the traditional Church that calls the shots, far-right intellectuals have taken over the role of medievel clergy. Ironically, it was the French Revolution that sent shock waves across the West, abolishing monarchies and autocracies and bringing in liberal democracies and rule of the people. It also liberated the State from the control of the Church and led to the adoption of secularism as a concept derived from the principle of individual liberty. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen drafted during the period was the precursor of the International Human Rights Law. This form of secularism has been followed so religiously in the later
half of the century that it has become a religion by itself with its
own set of presumptions and dogmas.Things now seems to have come to a full circle, like the mythical Ourobus that I so often allude to.
