JOIN USFlagging national honour: 'Har Ghar Tiranga'
Khadi is the most political cloth in modern world history. The Tiranga or Tricolour of the flag with the Ashoka Chakra is a symbol. It reflects the values of the nation, new in 1947, and its vision of itself, in the past and the future, as a proud, strong, self-reliant State and not a slave to the dictates of global capitalism.
Iconic images of Mahatma Gandhi spinning on his charkha, India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru patiently making yarn from cotton, the dress code of all Congress politicians, even bureaucrats and ordinary patriotic Indians of a certain generation was apparel made from khadi. The starched white, mostly scratchy material was instantly identifiable.
The Tiranga stitched from khadi cloth represented something more than the flimsy clichés that are being circulated by AD-ARWGOV via SMS texts to mobile phones across India – "One Nation, One Emotion, One Identity" – urging citizens "to bring home the National Flag" to celebrate the Amrit Mahotsav. The flag stitched with khadi cloth represents aspirations.
Jawaharlal Nehru's historic speech at the midnight hour in 1947 is mostly remembered for his remarkable summary of the moment: "a tryst with destiny." On behalf of the "children of India," Nehru made a pledge. It is a long quote but worth repeating: "The future beckons to us. Whither do we go and what shall be our endeavour? To bring freedom and opportunity to the common man, to the peasants and workers of India; to fight and end poverty and ignorance and disease; to build up a
prosperous, democratic and progressive nation, and to create social, economic and political institutions which will ensure justice and fullness of life to every man and woman."
In 1991, when the P V Narasimha Rao government, of which Manmohan Singh was the finance minister, boldly adopted structural reforms, liberalisation and globalisation, there was a clear consciousness that India had not fulfilled its pledge of 1947 to every citizen. In 2017, former prime minister Manmohan Singh looking back at 25 years post reforms, acknowledged the nation still faced daunting challenges in the employment, health, education, infrastructure, industry, and environment sector. The Khadi Tiranga symbolised the promise that is still to be redeemed, which in Gandhi's words, is to wipe the tears from every eye.
Instead of messaging sentimental but airy abstractions about bringing home the flag to symbolise nation, emotion and identity, the Modi regime needs to tell every Indian and indeed the world how, in the next 25 weeks or months, he and his government plan on addressing the crisis of unemployment that keeps climbing up and up and is now at 7.8 per cent, the rising job losses estimated to have touched 13 million in June-July, dealing with the gaps that have emerged in learning during the pandemic, making sure that every Indian gets three nutritious meals every day, instead of the sharp cutbacks that crores of families are being forced to make, as they struggle to manage domestic budgets in an environment of job-work insecurity.
Allowing the masses, that is, the "public," in the language of the Flag Code, permission to use Tiranga Jhanda made of polyester and giving state and central government organisations and ministries and private organisations and just about everyone else to fly shiny new versions of the flag is also a political statement. Alas, it will not make polyester the most political cloth in modern world history, unlike the khadi used for making flags before 30 December 30, 2021, when the flag code was amended to include polyester as a material for making the Tiranga. The reason is simple – polyester is not the "livery of freedom," which is Nehru's description of khadi.
It will certainly make the regime of Narendra Modi memorable for the malign and meaningless change in the Flag Code. As the date for India's 75th year of its "tryst with destiny" approaches, the trivialities to which the Modi regime has reduced the glory associated with celebrating Independence is depressing.
Imported polyester that can now be used for making the Tiranga or, for that matter mill made cotton or a mix is also a political statement. The change leads in the direction of a suspicion that the switch to polyester is another way of rewriting the history of the freedom movement and the most political cloth in contemporary world history. The Amrit Mahotsav, a mouthful that conveys something, but exactly what is difficult to pin down, will flag off the start of the Amrit Kaal, also an invented mouthful will kick off with a controversy over the materiality of the symbol of national honour and its history.
Ironically, the other most political cloth in the recent history of the Empire was the material described as muslin. The muslin and the khadi have a common ancestor; the hand-spun yarn and the hand-woven technique. The other thing that muslin and khadi share is the gender of the workforce necessary to produce the best of the best material. Women spinners of yarn were essential to producing the fine count of yarn for the see-through fabric. Research has revealed that the upper caste, indeed Brahmin widows and destitute women who had to take care of themselves, made a good living out of spinning the finest of yarns in the heyday of muslin exports as a luxury good to Europe after the new trade routes were established in the 17th century.
The protest by Shivanand Mathapati, secretary of the Karnataka Khadi Gramodyog Samyukta Sangha, Bengeri, that "more than 1,200 women employees are involved in the process, including 800 in spinning and weaving in Gaddankeri in Bagalkot and around 400 women in stitching, dyeing and bleaching of the flag in the Hubballi centre. Nearly 35,000 to 40,000 employees work in the khadi sector across the state. The Centre's decision will render all these people jobless in the coming days" is almost the same as the lament of the widows in the 18th century. The widows were squeezed out of earning independent incomes by industrially produced yarn from Lancashire and strangely ended up abandoned in Benares and Mathura-Vrindavan.
The change in the flag code, allows the public to feel homogenised as "one nation, one emotion, one identity" by hoisting the Tiranga at home and then forgetting about it because it does not need to be hoisted at dawn nor hauled down at dusk, raises a further problem. How will the tattered and discoloured flags made with polyester or khadi be respectfully disposed of? With crores of flags that the public is expected to buy and hoist, there will come a time when wind, rain and sun will wear them out. The flag code is clear – flags have to be "disposed of in private consistent with the dignity of the Flag."
The code specifies that the flag should not be "discarded" or "thrown on ground;" instead, the flag has to be disposed of in private, that is, burnt with all respect and appropriate dignity.
Burning the flag as recommended in the code could be dangerously polluting, especially if the material is polyester. Failing to recycle the polyester flag is also an act of bad faith since Modi has committed India to implement measures to stop climate change and promote sustainability.
Sustainable disposal or dignified disposal would require lifestyle changes. Household waste would have to be religiously segregated to prevent defiling the flag. Shall every citizen who buys the flag to make Modi's scheme of Har Ghar Tiranga a success be given a manual at its disposal? Will there be community vigilantes who will monitor the disposal? Who will be the army of vigilantes required to ensure the disposal with dignity?
Given that a contractual sanitation worker in Uttar Pradesh was sacked because he failed to notice that in the garbage he had collected, there was a photograph of Narendra Modi, the imagination is challenged speculating on how the flags will be "disposed of" if careless Indians were to dump the tattered flag in the garbage. Shall every sanitation worker in every village, city, and suburb get the necessary training to ensure that not one scrap of Tiranga ends up on the garbage heap?
Checking every scrap of cloth or paper that ends up on the garbage heap requires an enormous investment. It could be a new kind of job created in the service sector, and it could have an impact on India's dangerously critical unemployment problem. The Modi regime may have inadvertently hit upon a job creation programme through the Har Ghar Tiranga campaign and the 25 years of the Amrit Kaal to celebrate India's independence.
(Shikha Mukerjee is a journalist based in Kolkata)
Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.