After the charge of sedition of a JNU sedition, Smriti Irani ordered that the national flag will on the campuses of all 46 Central Universities, prominently and proudly to signify a strong India. The ministry has also specified the height and weight of the flag, and has decreed that the flag should be 207 feet high and should weigh 135 kilograms. In the saffron nationalism versus freedom of speech debate that has rocked the polity and university campuses across the country, it is the revered national Tricolour that seems to have come to the aid of the Union Government at the Centre. The Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) will be first institution where the flag will be unfurled but it remains to be seen if that would help in defusing the bitter row over a sedition case filed against the president of its student’s union. Its ideologues have long propagated that the ideal flag for India is the saffron one with the blue chakra. Thus the tricolour has come to BJP’s rescue from its ham-handed handling of JNU row.
S. Abhishek Ramaswamy
(The views expressed by the author in the article are his/her own.)
