Actor Malisha Heena Khan joins worldwide protest against Taliban dress-code for women students

NEW DELHI: Mumbai-based actress Malisha Heena Khan who originally hails from the border areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan, today joined the worldwide protest against the diktats of the Taliban’s new dress code for women.

Afghan women across the world had started an online campaign to protest against the strict new dress code for female students imposed by the Taliban, and Malisha was among the first to support them.

She posted a nude image on her Twitter timeline with various hashtags condemning the Taliban imposition of the burqa and hizab dress code for women in colleges and universities in Afghanistan.

Afghan women are posting photos of themselves wearing colorful traditional dresses on social media using hashtags like #DoNotTouchMyClothes and #AfghanistanCulture.

The campaign was started by Dr Bahar Jalali, a former history professor at the American University in Afghanistan, and has seen hundreds of women posting their photos as well as comments against the Taliban rules and dress code.

Jalali said she started the campaign “to inform, educate, and dispel the misinformation that is being propagated by Taliban”, reported the Hindustan Times.

“No woman has ever dressed like this in the history of Afghanistan. This is utterly foreign and alien to Afghan culture. I posted my pic in the traditional Afghan dress to inform, educate, and dispel the misinformation that is being propagated by Taliban,” Jalali, a former faculty member of the American University of Afghanistan according to her LinkedIn profile, said.

The Taliban mandated the segregation of genders in classrooms and said women students, teachers and employees must wear hijabs. Women can only attend schools and University in Afghanistan if they are kept in different classrooms.

On Saturday, photos emerged of women students wearing head-to-toe black robes and waving Taliban flags in the lecture hall of a government-run university in Kabul.