The Karnataka hijab controversy is a "creation of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)". The ISI’s radicalistion project to fuel trouble in the South Indian State was underway for over a month through the Barre Sagher movement of the Al Qaeda that has recruited a large number of radical Muslim clerics, mostly in southern States to radicalize community youth, said experts tracking terrorism and radicalization in the Indian Subcontinent.

Incidentally, the Taliban has also launched a proactive global hijab movement to coincide with the events in Karnataka in order to give a voice to the Muslim women to insist on wearing the Islamic dress in educational institutions.

ISI’s terror cohorts like Lashkar-e-Tayabba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) managed to shoot a video of burqa burning by Tajik-origin minor Afghan girls on January 3 and this video clip was widely circulated in Pakistan through various local WhatsApp groups to portray the same as an incident recorded in India.

Subsequently, Anas Haqqani, head of the Pakistan-backed Haqqani Network, launched a campaign for making Hijab compulsory after the Pakistani propaganda. Pakistani media outlets are also playing up the incident widely to portray India in bad light and give Islamabad the opportunity to rake up the issue at multilateral fora like the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and United Nations (UN).

To give credence to the ISI propaganda and insidious design, the Pakistan government on Wednesday summoned the Indian Charge d'affaires in Islamabad on Wednesday to convey grave concern and condemnation of the “deeply reprehensible act” in Karnataka.

“Both the gullible young Muslim students as well as the right wing youth groups fell into the Pakistani trap inadvertently and out of ignorance are pitted against one another. Unfortunately, even a large section of the mainstream media is also playing into the Pakistani agenda by not portraying the issue in proper perspective,” counter-terrorism expert Dr Rituraj Mate said. The Barre Sagheer movement of the Al Qaeda is being patronized by the Imran Khan regime in Pakistan as part of the ongoing Pakistan military-ISI complex of perpetrating low intensity conflicts (LIC) through innovative but radical measures to destablise India, both on the political as well as economic fronts, Dr Mate said.

The poster girl of the hijab movement Bibi Muskan Khan, a second-year commerce student at PES College of Arts, Science and Commerce, Mandya, Karnataka is on record praising the college management saying nobody from the educational institution administration has asked her to remove her hijab.

“My principal is with me, my lecturers are with me. Nobody has ever asked me to remove my hijab. They were asking me to come to college as usual. They are protecting me,” Muskan has reportedly said.

On Tuesday, Muskan arrived at her college gates wearing a hijab and burqa but she was stopped by a group of men who demanded that she remove the Islamic dress. She, however, did not budge and entered the college as usual retorting, “Allah Hu Akbar” in response to Jai Shri Ram chants by the group opposing her.

Muskan has herself said she did not recognize the youth group that heckled her, terming them as “outsiders”, not from her college.

But her position is not being widely circulated in the media, complicating the relationship between students of various religious denominations.

The Pakistani media is selectively playing the alleged heckling story without projecting the incident in complete perspective as part of its dubious designs to malign India.

Karnataka Education Minister BC Nagesh has said Campus Front of India, the student wing of the radical group Popular Front of India is behind the hijab controversy in the State.

The hijab issue has also reached the Karnataka High Court seeking adjudication on the “right” of wearing hijab on the educational campuses in the State.

The Barre Sagheer movement was launched in 2008-09 by Al Qaeda in collusion with the ISI in anticipation of the withdrawal of foreign forces from Afghanistan sooner or later. It has been operational in India for the past over four years.

The Barre Sagheer movement’s objective was to identify like-minded outfits of clerics and bring them under one umbrella to ramp up radicalization and subsequently create Taliban-like movements in the South Asian region, initially through a network of over ground sympathisers and subsequently through radical movements.

The other objective was to elicit a united voice of these outfits of clerics to express solidarity with Taliban in getting international recognition after the exit of the US and allied forces from Afghanistan.

The agenda of achieving the objectives of the Barre Sagheer movement was tasked by the Al Qaeda to Haqqani Network and Taliban was committed to facilitate such like-minded outfits.