The Indian government is seeking to extend an order making it mandatory for people to stand for the national anthem before film screenings to also include obliging children to sing the anthem at school.
India’s supreme court announced in December that all cinemas would have to play the national anthem before screenings and that citizens would have to “stand up in respect” for the duration.
Too much disrespect of national symbols had been indulged in the name of “individually perceived notions of freedom”, the court said at the time.
The order has led to confusion, arrests and scuffles, with many Indians who watched the recent Bollywood hit, Dangal uncertain whether they were required by law to stand during a scene in which the anthem was played.
The supreme court, which generally enjoys greater leeway to pronounce on policies than the highest courts in the US or UK, clarified on Tuesday that the anthem order did not compel anyone to sing, and that cinemagoers could remain seated if the music was played in the course of a film or documentary.
Mukul Rohatgi, the Indian attorney general, suggested the court should also reconsider a 30-year-old judgment that grants schoolchildren the right not to sing the national anthem.
The exception was carved out after a Jehovah’s Witness argued that forcing his children to sing the anthem – an act many of the faith consider to be pledging allegiance to the false god – violated their constitutional right to religious freedom.
Rohtagi said it was “extremely important to instil a sense of nationalism from childhood” and that “the legal position does not remain static and must change with the times”, according to the Indian Express.
The government has also been forced to clarify how the law should apply to people unable to stand due to injury or disability, ordering that instead they should try not to move and “maintain the maximum possible alertness physically”.
The court on Tuesday discouraged “moral policing” of the order by citizens. More than a dozen people have been arrested across the country for not standing during the anthem, or in fights that subsequently broke out over their unwillingness to rise.
Last October in Goa, where standing for the anthem has long been mandatory, a writer and activist who uses a wheelchair was allegedly assaulted in a cinema by another patron who grew angry that he had not stood for the anthem.
In the past year, the country’s cinema industry has repeatedly found itself embroiled in debates about India’s national character under its first majority Hindu nationalist government, led by Narendra Modi.
Critics say the rise of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party has emboldened Hindu supremacists and given voice to a more divisive, narrow definition of what it means to be Indian.
