New Delhi, June 18: Pratibha Patil has been accused of speaking the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s language after she said Indian society adopted the purdah to protect women against the Mughal invaders.

“We had the concept of purdah to protect women from Mughal invaders. So, they stayed indoors and were veiled,” the UPA President nominee said at a ceremony to mark Maharana Pratap’s 467th birth anniversary in Udaipur yesterday.

The Rajasthan governor, who may become India’s first woman President, then said the practice should end at a time “women are progressing in every field”.

“Today we are citizens of free India. There is a need to put a stop to such practices. That alone will ensure real respect for women,” she added.

Academics and Muslim scholars said the Mughal remark was historically inaccurate because the veil was worn in India long before the 16th-century invaders came. Some Muslim organisations attacked Patil both for the “historical distortion” and the call to end the purdah.

“She is speaking RSS language. It reveals her mind. It does not suit a presidential candidate to propagate saffronised distortion of history,” Jamaat-e-Islami Hind secretary Mujtaba Farooq claimed.

Jamait Ulema-i-Hind general secretary Maulana Mahmood Madani, also an MP, alleged: “This is the line of thought that led to the Partition. This is the line of the Sangh Parivar and we will never tolerate this.”

He said the second part of Patil’s remarks amounted to an attack on Muslims’ religious freedom.

“What message is she trying to give by attacking our religious freedom?” he asked, but added that veils of some kind or the other had been part of Indian culture as a whole and was not restricted to Muslims.

Patil did not name any community in her remarks. In many parts of northern India, including Rajasthan, Hindu women veil their faces in public and before elders at home.