Sadhguru: Neither the religious, nor the lecherous should determine how women should dress

The retributive culture of punishing someone for what they wear should be put to an end, Sadhguru said on Tuesday as he asserted that neither the religious nor the lecherous should determine how women should dress. 

Let women decide how they want to be attired, he said, referring to the anti-hijab protests in Iran.

“Neither the religious nor the lecherous should determine how women should dress. Let women decide how they want to be attired. May this retributive culture of punishing someone for what they wear be put to an end, religious or otherwise,” Sadhguru, founder of Isha Foundation, said in a tweet.

Protests have erupted across Iran in recent days after a 22-year-old woman died while being held by the morality police for violating the country's strictly enforced Islamic dress code.

Anger has seen women remove their mandatory headscarves, or hijabs, from covering their hair after the death of Mahsa Amini, who was picked up by morality police over her allegedly loose headscarf.

Videos online show women twirling them overhead, chanting. Others have burned them or cut off locks of their own hair in rage.

Amini's death has angered many Iranians, particularly the young, who have come to see it as part of the Islamic Republic's heavy-handed policing of dissent and the morality police's increasingly violent treatment of young women.

Earlier, commenting on the hijab controversy in Karnataka, Sadhguru had lamented that we were continuously looking at aspects which divides us. Talking to a TV channel, he stressed that children should not grow up with the prejudices that the previous generation has lived with.

The Supreme Court is hearing a batch of petitions challenging the Karnataka High Court verdict refusing to lift the ban on hijab in educational institutions of the state.

The state government had, by its order of February 5, 2022, banned wearing clothes that disturb equality, integrity, and public order in schools and colleges. The order was challenged by some Muslim girls in the high court.

—With PTI inputs