India: Jehovah's Witnesses may challenge order on national anthem in cinema theatres

[The Librarian]

The latest move by the Jehovah’s Witnesses will seek to overturn the apex court’s order on November 30, 2016, that all cinema halls in India would play the national anthem before the feature film starts.

OVER 30 years ago, a college professor in Kerala, who belonged to the Jehovah’s Witnesses sect, knocked at the doors of the highest court in India on behalf of his children, citing religion as the reason to safeguard their right to not sing the national anthem at school.
Next month, when a Supreme Court bench headed by Justice Dipak Misra restarts hearing petitions on its order last year on national anthems in cinema halls, the Jehovah’s Witnesses may again be at the forefront in challenging that decision.
On August 11, 1986, the Supreme Court had allowed Emmanuel’s plea and held that forcing the children to sing the national anthem at school violated their fundamental right to religion.
The latest move by the Jehovah’s Witnesses will seek to overturn the apex court’s order on November 30, 2016, that all cinema halls in India would play the national anthem before the feature film starts. This order also made it mandatory for all present in the hall “to stand up to show respect to the national anthem” as part of their “sacred obligation”.

This time, it’s learnt that representatives of Jehovah’s Witnesses, including a US-based general counsel, are in the process of finalising a detailed application to be filed shortly in Supreme Court, which will restart hearings on February 14.
Among other things, the sect plans to seek the court’s intervention in ordering that its followers won’t have to stand up for the anthem in movie theatres. The sect hopes to convince the court that while it respects the national anthem and the flag, its religious beliefs prevent members from standing up for or singing the anthem.
The organisation has already secured relief on behalf of the sect on various issues in several countries, including saluting the flag and/or singing a country’s national anthem.
”Our patriotism can never be in doubt. But even standing for the national anthem is not allowed in our religion. Courts in several other countries have accepted our pleas on this count. The fact that we are looking to contest the court’s order doesn’t mean that we don’t respect our flag or our anthem. We hope to convince the court about that, like we have done in other countries, including the US and Canada,” said sources linked to the sect’s move.
When contacted, former Union law minister and senior advocate Kapil Sibal confirmed that he has been approached by representatives of the sect in this regard.
”They informed me that their religious views don’t allow them to even stand up when the anthem is played. Their stand is that this doesn’t mean they will ever do anything to disrespect any country’s flag or anthem. These are issues of significant Constitutional importance,” Sibal told The Indian Express.
Jehovah’s Witnesses is a Christianity-based evangelical sect, which bases its beliefs solely on the text of the Bible. The group does not celebrate Easter or Christmas and believes that traditional Churches have deviated from the text of the Bible. However, the sect is not considered a part of mainstream Christianity because it also rejects the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.
In the 1986 case, the Supreme Court bench had ruled in favour of the Jehovah’s Witnesses family. “Our tradition teaches tolerance, our philosophy teaches tolerance, our Constitution practices tolerance, let us not dilute it,” the bench had said.
It had also noted that there was “no provision of law”, which “obliges” anyone to sing the national anthem.
However, the bench of Justice Misra, in its order last year, had said that “a time has come” when “citizens of the country must realise that they live in a nation and are duty bound to show respect to the National Anthem, which is the symbol of Constitutional patriotism and inherent national quality”.
On December 9, the bench clarified its order to state that “if a physically challenged person or physically handicapped person goes to the cinema hall to watch a film, he need not stand up, if he is incapable to stand, but must show such conduct which is commensurate with respect for the national anthem”.
The order has drawn widespread criticism, with renowned jurist Soli Sorabjee terming it as an example of “judicial overreach”.
In 1986, armed with the Supreme Court order, Emmanuel got his and other children from Jehovah’s Witnesses re-admitted in the NSS High School at Kidangoor in Kottayam district, 4 km from their village Kadaplamattom near Pala. The school run by the Hindu organisation, Nair Service Society, had 11 students from the sect, at the time.
After sitting in the classes for a day, the Emmanuel children left school. Some of the other children from the sect moved to other schools.
Emmanuel decided not to have formal education for his other four children, either. None of his eight grandchildren, who study in various schools, sings the national anthem.

http://indianexpress.com/article/india/jehovahs-witnesses-may-challenge-sc-anthem-order-4465581/

Via

[Jack Ryan]

How much will Watchtower spend on something like this?.....As much as it takes..

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

How about food and shelter for the poor in India?!!..

[Guest Kurt]

A song of our collective freedoms, an act of unfreedom

Coercing children to learn the national anthem will not make them fonder of the nation or foster cohesion

Here is a thought experiment. Say, the powers that be who govern India have decided that we, the people, are in need of a new national anthem. More importantly, you, the reader of this page, have been asked to write the words. The conditions proposed are simple but open-ended: the words must be jargon- and euphemism-free, the lines must arouse a feeling of the collective but also be spacious enough for our private imaginations to wander, and ultimately, the words must neither coerce identities nor elevate one group of people over another. And yes, it must be short.

This now, when you think about it, is a mighty difficult task: to write words that can soar and yet remain grounded. More than the melody and gravitas, the real challenge is to speak to a diversity in a country without being treacly and melodramatic. In essence, while acts of patriotism are probably easier to identify, finding the right kind of language to describe patriotism is hard. Conversely, harder still is knowing what exactly is this ‘patriotism’ that our language seeks to describe?

 

Patriotism from above

Even Rabindranath Tagore, who was ever suspicious of false gods and whose lines are now deemed as part of our “sacred obligation” by the Supreme Court no less, was suspicious of patriotism from above. In his now little-read collection of essays on nationalism, Tagore writes that “neither the colourless vagueness of cosmopolitanism, nor the fierce self-idolatory of nation-worship is the goal of human history”. Man, he thought, is not born to worship his nation, far less offer an uncritical fealty to the symbols that exalt the idea of that nationhood. Yet one of the great mysteries of our lives in the 21st century is how the idea of a nation, or of a bureaucratic state, becomes the carapace inside which our adult emotional lives are spent. Most of us can’t imagine our lives without a nationality to anchor ourselves to. Man may not be an island, but he is an islet in an archipelago of affiliations — connected yet separate. Even refugees, who sometimes save themselves at the expense of their peers, insist on a membership in the very same collective that now lies in fragments. Patriotism, or a form of commitment to the nation, in essence, howsoever disfigured its patrimonial legacies have often been, is here to stay.

 

 

Sacralising the nation

These questions of patriotism burble up yet again now because the Attorney General, Mukul Rohatgi, has deemed that a debate on mandatory anthem singing in schools is necessary. Further, he proposes to review, and perhaps re-litigate, the 30-year-old exception from singing the anthem granted to the adherents of Jehovah’s Witnesses. This plan is in spite of an overburdened judicial system, ostensibly because according to Mr. Rohatgi, it is “extremely important to instil a sense of nationalism from childhood”. For an officer of the state — a post-colonial state, no less, surrounded by inimical neighbours and marked by inflexible citizens citing transcendental claims — it is understandable that sacralising the nation seems natural, even attractive.

But this attitude forgets that nations don’t grow fonder in our hearts, far less elicit sacrifices or foster cohesion from citizens because of state-mandated daily ounces of patriotism in our schools. On the contrary, what we see world over is that strong states are marked by norms of collegiality and traditions of respect and dissent towards symbols of our collective union, not legally enforceable mandates with the threat of punishment. Dismissing a West Virginia state law that previously demanded Jehovah’s Witnesses recite the Pledge of Allegiance, Justice Robert Jackson of the U.S. Supreme Court wrote in 1943 that “to believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous, instead of a compulsory routine, is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds.”

This is something our democratic government must also remember. Worse yet, coercing the singing of the national anthem, a song of our collective freedoms, a testimony to the affirmations of gratitude and joy by our ancestors will paradoxically be associated by our children with an unfreedom no different than the tedium of multiplication tables and the tyranny of eating vegetables. We don’t, after all, legally mandate either of those two.

THE HINDU