The Tiranga, our National Flag, was intended as a symbolic metaphor for India and its diverse communities and people, linked together by the sacred wheel of the Ashoka Chakra.

Equally important to the creators of the flag was its base material. Khadi was the fabric of our Freedom Movement – the spinning of thread on the charkha and the play of warp and weft on the loom wove together the themes of Swadeshi, our traditional hand crafts, and employment and earning for rural communities, especially women. 

For Gandhi and successive post-Independence generations the flag embodied our identity, our ideals, our hopes and vision for the future. 

As per the Flag Code of India, published on June 22, 1947, “The National Flag of India shall be made of hand spun and hand woven wool/cotton/silk khadi bunting.” Annually, over the years, production of these flags gave employment to thousands of workers, and khadi units all over India.

Now – shock, horror, heartbreak …. The Central Government has just amended the 2002 Flag Code, and allowed the manufacturing and import of machine-made national flags – made using polyester!

The Indian flag market was already flooded with synthetic flags being sold all over the country – from street corners to sports stadiums. Ironically most were from China, a country we are in armed dispute with at our border. This is also robbing already straitened rural spinners, weavers and tailors of much needed earning and unemployment. Now this has been made legal and official. 

The rationale is apparently to make cheaper flags more widely available, especially in our 75th year celebrations. Of course, we want people to wave flags – they carry an important message. However, there are things more important than price – and national identity and national employment are surely two of them. Cheap is not necessarily better. There are many ways to produce more and cheaper flags – setting up more production units, investing in, streamlining, and supporting production, making paper flags (unlike polyester and plastic, they are also biodegradable) training homebound women to stitch flags, removing that absurd ban on anyone except KVIC marketing khadi…. Importing synthetic polyester flags is certainly not the answer. What happened to Aatmanirbhar Bharat and Make in India??

Coincidentally, I am writing this in Bijapur in North Karnataka, less than a hundred kilometres from where the first Khadi Production Unit for the Indian flag was set up. Others followed, but this was the forerunner. Now their future is uncertain.

My favourite Indian flag is the one seen stenciled on the flushed cheeks of excited young kids at test matches. The second best and most appropriate is the original khadi one, imbued with history and meaning.  

Let us all loudly protest the legitimised intrusion of polyester. Gandhi would be aghast at this desecration of his beloved fabric of freedom and the Tiranga.

*The writer is a textile expert and scholar.

Related:

Urgent need to revive and sustain Banarasi weaving industry

Why Gandhian message of ‘Swadeshi’ is still relevant today

The post Honouring the Tricolour appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Image: PTI

Of course we must protest at any attempt to intimidate anyone observing their religious practice, and its easy to see this as part of a deliberate harassment of minority communities – the recent vandalisation of the St Stephens College chapel and Principal’s grave being another instance.

However, disrupting traffic or unauthorised occupation of private property cannot be allowed. I see the controversy as a wonderful opportunity for civil society to demand that the public observance of ANY religion should be forbidden altogether in our already overcrowded, noisy and volatile cities – whether these be Kavadias, Muharram processions, or the recent assertive Ram Naumi celebrations which actually led to destruction and loss of life.

Similarly, political leaders receiving darshan from various gurus, maulanas and sants, or visiting temples, mosques, churches or pilgrimage sites should be their private affair; not be covered in the media or milked for political mileage. Loudspeakers blaring from mosques, noisy truck/motorbike parades that block roads, and Satsangs taking over public parks should all be prohibited. If done impartially, even-handedly, legally, and without fear or favour, this would be an important step in confining religion to our hearts, homes and religious places; while keeping it firmly out of both public life and public spaces. After all a fundament of all faiths is living in peace, not competitive self-assertion.

As for the use of a vacant plot to say prayers, and why shouldn’t it be permitted since no one is being harmed or impeded? Lets call a spade a spade. All over India the gathering of devotees, whether Hindu, Muslim or tribal, in an unoccupied space is often the start of encroachment of land. A small kachha roadside shrine under a peepal tree mushrooms over the years into a permanent structure, then into a bigger and bigger temple which no one dares demolish; an unknown grave is sanctified overnight into a holy mazaar, given a roof, and the edifice grows and grows – sometimes in the middle of a crowded marketplace. We all have seen and sometimes suffered countless examples. My parents lost half an acre of land on Banjara Hills that way, because the judiciary and the local administration were not ready to take a stand. People cannot be allowed to take over a space that is not theirs, however holy their intention.

As it happens, though we are encouraged to pray in a congregation, especially on Fridays and Eid, (as a demonstration of the brotherhood and equality of man), Muslims can pray anywhere as long as we are ritually clean and know the right direction! The desert sand, a corner of your room…… Even a prayer rug is not required. Though there are injunctions re times, conditions, etc it is the Muslim clergy that have stratified these over the years, in a way that was never intended. Islam is an intensely practical religion. If you miss a prayer, Qadaa permits you to add it to the next one. I never remember my father or uncles, as professional diplomats, army and airforce officers, lawyers, bureaucrats, heads of companies, taking a break from their duties to pray. Or demanding leave because they were fasting! My deeply devout grandmother would never break up a party in her home, when they were non-Muslim guests, to announce it was time for namaz. She would say an extra prayer later. In Islamic countries, it’s possible for social and official life to adjust itself around the prescribed religious timings and calendar. In a secular country you should not demand special license or make a big deal of your faith. You can always, in the time-honoured Indian phrase, “adjust”. I can’t remember in my youth, people using a visit to the Gurudwara, mandir or mosque as a justifiable excuse for coming late to office as they do now. These days, sadly, whatever your religion, the form and ritual have become more important than the actual meaning. An assertion of community rather than god.

Of course, there are reasons for the namaz issue becoming so emotive. For many Indian Muslims the knee-jerk stereotyping and suspicion these days, be it the food they eat or the cut of their beard; the questioning even of their nationalism because of their faith – seem symbolic of a gradual loss of their rights as citizens, a demand by the majority for quiescent conformity. As a result they too, with other religious communities, majority or minority, are feeling the need to ostentatiously flex their muscles. The current Gurgaon impasse is not so much about a place to worship as pride. On both sides, it is a statement of identity and who has a right to it.

All this can only deteriorate further unless we all demand that faith becomes strictly a personal matter out of the public domain – FOR EVERYBODY. Present and past governments are reluctant to tackle the sensitive hornet’s nest of religion. They prefer to give small sops and ridiculous meaningless concessions to keep everyone happy. It is far easier to grant an extra holiday for Muslims, make Vande Mataram obligatory, or impose a meat ban during Navratri, than take a firm unilateral secular stand.

If the Haryana Govt simultaneously banned ALL religious gatherings and processions in public places, while allotting some space where these events could happen, it would set an example for Governments all over India, and be a policy where all faiths would be equal and no one’s “sentiments” would be “hurt”!

The Quran’s injunction, to “Be righteous and act justly to those who worship another God.” works as well for Government as it does for all of us.

A Facebook post by the writer

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