On 15 December 2025, during an official appointment ceremony at the Bihar secretariat, a moment unfolded that deserves to be read not as an awkward lapse but as a political symptom. A video circulated widely showing Chief Minister Nitish Kumar publicly interfering with the hijab worn by Dr Nusrat Parveen, a young doctor receiving her appointment letter. As cameras recorded the scene and officials looked on, a Muslim woman’s bodily autonomy and religious self-presentation were treated as objects of inspection and correction by the state’s highest elected authority. What was enacted was not governance but spectacle: a small, cruel performance staged to remind its audience who may be humiliated with impunity.

The episode matters less for its choreography than for what it reveals about the moral economy of contemporary Indian politics. Public humiliation—once the by-product of communal violence or bureaucratic indifference—has increasingly become a leadership technique in its own right. The aim is not persuasion but degradation: the conversion of vulnerability into visibility, and visibility into warning.

Power, not accident

To explain the Patna incident as senility, misjudgement or cultural misunderstanding is to misrecognise the nature of political power. Power is most clearly exercised not when it governs neutrally, but when it marks bodies as available for correction. Kumar’s gesture toward the hijab, accompanied by the question ‘What is this?’, was not an inquiry but a declaration: that Muslim difference remains permanently provisional, always subject to the majority’s approval.

Political philosophy offers little ambiguity here. From Aristotle’s insistence that public office requires ethical restraint to Kant’s injunction never to treat persons merely as means, leadership has long been understood as a moral practice before it is a technical one. Modern democratic theory sharpens........

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