Patriotism today is defined and its expressions determined by the ruling dispensation. People throughout the country are expected to profess it in a uniform and obvious way. The chief minister of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee, had criminal proceedings instituted against her for allegedly having insulted the national anthem during a visit to Mumbai. The magistrate’s court that initiated the proceedings had responded to a complaint from a Bharatiya Janata Party leader in Maharashtra. A sessions court, however, set aside the summons recently, and sent the case back to the magistrate’s court on the basis of procedural issues and with directions to reconsider the facts. The sessions court reportedly said that not standing up while the national anthem was being sung or not singing it could be seen as disrespectful but these were not crimes. Section 3 of the Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act, 1971, states clearly that preventing the anthem from being sung and disrupting its singing were alone to be penalised. Ms Banerjee’s alleged actions did not match either of these. Earlier, the Jammu and Kashmir High Court had also ruled on similar lines on a teacher accused of insulting national honour for not singing the anthem.

It is strange that imagined insults to national honour can take up the courts’ time and public money amid urgent cases of violence and injustice. Love for the country is a cherished value, a feeling that develops spontaneously and finds multiple forms of expression. It cannot be manifested to order. The Narendra Modi-led government’s patronage of vigilantes who assaulted people or threw them out of movie halls in a frenzy of love for the motherland for not standing up during the national anthem — one target was in a wheelchair — most frequently between 2016 and 2018 contributed to the overall atmosphere of coercion and fear. Using mandatory patriotic displays as a weapon is also a way of marking boundaries — those who do not conform can be marked as disloyal and charged with sedition. The intention behind such overactive patriotism was made clear in the effort of a BJP leader to amend the law in question by adding as criminal offences not standing up during the national anthem and not singing it. Had he succeeded, pronouncements by the courts on these matters may have been different.