For 55 years, Indians could not fly their own flag on an ordinary day

In the early 1990s, a man named Naveen Jindal put an Indian flag on the roof of the office at his factory. The factory was in Raigarh, then in Madhya Pradesh and now in Chhattisgarh. He was in his twenties, and he ran the plant for the family company.

Officials told him to take it down. According to the published accounts, they confiscated the flag and told him that he could be prosecuted. Years later, the Supreme Court wrote its own summary of the case. Its words are drier:

He being in charge of the factory of the said Company situated at Raigarh in Madhya Pradesh was flying National Flag at the office premises of his factory. He was not allowed to do so by the Government officials on the ground that the same is impermissible under the Flag Code of India.

He did not burn the flag, damage it or fly it upside down. He flew the flag of his country, the right way up, on a building he was responsible for. The day was not a national holiday. That was the offence.

Whose flag was it?

Until 2002, an ordinary Indian could not fly the national flag on an ordinary day. The general public could display it only on specified national occasions. For the rest of the year, normal flag flying belonged to government buildings and to a fixed list of officials and dignitaries.

No single law said this directly. The rule came from three sources. The first was the Emblems and Names (Prevention of Improper Use) Act of 1950. The second was the Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act of 1971. The third was the old Flag Code. The Flag Code was a set of executive instructions, not a law that Parliament passed.

Together they created a settled understanding. The flag belonged to the state. The citizen was a spectator with visiting rights twice a year.

That is strange for a flag with this history. The design comes from the Swaraj flag of the Congress. It was based on Pingali Venkayya's work, and Gandhi changed it. People carried it in processions, and the same government had put those people in jail. It was a protest banner before it was a state emblem. Then the protest succeeded, and people needed permission to fly it.

The argument he made

Jindal went to the Delhi High Court. His case was cleverer than "let me fly a flag".

He argued two points. First, the Flag Code was not law at all. Parliament never passed it. It was an internal instruction to the administration, and an instruction alone cannot take away a citizen's liberty. Second, to fly the national flag is a form of expression. Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution protects expression.

In 1995, the High Court agreed on both points. The Union Government appealed.

The government changed the rule during the case

This, I think, is the most revealing moment in the whole story.

The government's appeal was still pending, but it rewrote the rules anyway. The Flag Code of India, 2002 took effect on 26 January 2002. Its second part deals with display of the flag by members of the public, private organisations and educational institutions. From that date, an ordinary citizen could fly the tricolour on any day of the year, if they did so with dignity.

So in 2002 the executive gave up on the substance, but it continued to argue the principle in court. It had decided that the policy was wrong. But it still wanted the law to say that the permission had been its to give.

23 January 2004

The Supreme Court gave its judgment in Union of India v Naveen Jindal on 23 January 2004. The appeal dated from 1996. The bench was Chief Justice V.N. Khare with Justices Brijesh Kumar and S.B. Sinha. It upheld the High Court.

Right to fly the National Flag freely with respect and dignity is a fundamental right of a citizen within the meaning of Article 19(1)(a).

This made it a fundamental right. Before, it was only a concession in a code that the Home Ministry could rewrite. Now it is in the same clause as free speech. Only the reasonable restrictions that this clause already allows can limit it.

The flag became the national flag in 1947. In 2002, an ordinary Indian could fly it on an ordinary day. In 2004, it became a right. So for fifty five years, the answer to "can I fly my country's flag today" was no, for most people on most days. Jindal has since argued that India should mark 23 January as National Flag Day.

What the flag had to be made of

The other half of the story is about the material of the flag. It is stranger than the legal part.

An Indian national flag had to be hand-spun, hand-woven khadi. A Bureau of Indian Standards specification set very precise rules: 150 threads per square centimetre, four threads per stitch, and one square foot that weighs exactly 205 grams.

The part that attaches the flag to the pole is the khadi-duck. Its weave joins three threads instead of the usual two. By most accounts, fewer than twenty weavers in the country still know how to make it.

The cloth came from handloom units in the Dharwad and Bagalkot districts of northern Karnataka. The Khadi and Village Industries Commission issued the manufacturing licences. As recently as 2022, only four approved flag production units existed in all of India.

A country of well over a billion people had four places with permission to make its flag. Its specification fixed the weight of a square foot of flag to the gram.

Then the rules changed fast

On 30 December 2021, the Flag Code was amended. It rewrote the clause about the flag's material. The new text says that the flag "shall be made of hand-spun and handwoven or machine-made, cotton/polyester/wool/silk khadi bunting".

In July 2022, it amended the Code again. Now, where the flag is displayed in the open or on the house of a member of the public, "it may be flown day and night". The old rule took it down at sunset.

Both changes had one reason: Har Ghar Tiranga. This national campaign wanted a flag on every home for the seventy fifth anniversary of independence. Its target was about twenty crore flags. Four khadi workshops and a hand-weave that twenty people know cannot make twenty crore flags. Something had to change, and the khadi was the thing that changed.

The weavers' objection

The khadi producers protested. Their argument deserves a fair hearing.

When machine-made polyester flags became legal, demand for hand-spun flags collapsed. This hurt the workshops that had kept the standard alive for decades.

Their second objection was about meaning. Khadi and the spinning wheel were the economic programme of the freedom movement. Gandhi asked people to spin in their own homes as an act of refusal. A khadi flag carried that link.

Today anyone may fly the flag, day or night, on any house. In many cases, that flag is polyester, possibly made by machine. Both facts are part of the same story. The flag became truly available to ordinary people. The cost of that was the material that linked it to the struggle.

Two ways the flag was not yours

Within thirty years, the tricolour changed. First, officials could take it off your roof. Later, the state urged you to put it on your roof.

Mostly, that is a move from restriction to freedom. But at both ends, the government decided what your relationship with the flag should be. Before 2002, the instruction was that flying it was not for you. In 2022, the instruction was that you should fly it. Between them was a period when the answer was simple: it is your flag, and the question is nobody's business. Somebody had to sue to get that period.

Most Indians who now put a flag on the balcony in August have never heard of Union of India v Naveen Jindal. They do not know that, within living memory, you could lose the flag if you flew it on an ordinary Tuesday.