The Flag of Self-Respect

FOR THE FIRST TIME since 1950, the Christian hymn ‘Abide with Me’ was dropped from the Beating the Retreat ceremony in January this year. Scottish Anglican hymnodist Henry Francis Lyte’s 1861 hymn (written in 1847), set to the tune of William Henry Monk’s ‘Eventide’, was performed by the military band at the ceremony that concluded the Republic Day celebrations for seven decades. It was replaced with ‘Aye Mere Watan Ke Logon’, composed by Kavi Pradeep and sung for the first time by Lata Mangeshkar on Republic Day 1963. The decision provoked protests from some quarters but on the whole it was viewed in the larger context of India coming to own its independent identity. A part of the Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav celebrations to fully Indianise traditions and delink them from the colonial past, the decision was taken by the defence ministry in keeping with the Narendra Modi government’s agenda of decolonising and deconditioning the country. For the first time too, all the tunes played at the ceremony were Indian.

In a seamless continuity of the same agenda, Prime Minister Modi unveiled a new naval ensign, or nishaan, on September 2 at the commissioning of INS Vikrant at the Cochin Shipyard Limited in Kochi. The new ensign displays the Indian Navy’s crest against a navy blue background, encompassed by an octagon representing the royal seal or Mudra of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj. Dedicating the new ensign to Shivaji, Modi declared, “Today, India has taken off its chest a load of the colonial past and a symbol of servitude.” (The naval ensign is the flag that naval ships or formations carry to denote nationality on territorial and international waters.)

The re-visualising of the Navy’s ensign, drawing inspiration from the rich maritime heritage of pre-colonial India was not a one-off. On September 8, the government unveiled the new Central Vista at India Gate, a part of the project to build a new Parliament House—the current and ageing one is a reminder of the British Raj and India’s colonial baggage—and other key buildings in the India Gate area. The project began with the laying of the foundation stone of the new Parliament building on December 10, 2020. The redone Central Vista Avenue will re-landscape Rajpath, which links Rashtrapati Bhavan and India Gate. The redevelopment project is planned for the whole of the area that houses the Central administrative blocks on Raisina Hill. This was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and Sir Herbert Baker. The project, when completed by 2026, is expected to showcase a new and homegrown vision drawn from the subcontinent’s own architectural heritage.

More recently, the Modi government officially renamed Rajpath (Kingsway, named after King George V’s visit to India) as Kartavya Path (“Kartavya” meaning duty), thereby dedicating the road to the state’s duty towards citizens. The renaming exorcised the echoes of the Raj from Rajpath that once led to the Viceroy’s residence and the 130 hectare premises surrounding it. In September 2016, the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) took the decision to rename the iconic Race Course Road as Lok Kalyan (or Public Welfare) Marg. That move linked the road leading to the prime minister’s residence and office with the ethos of the new India, as opposed to the elitist associations of Race Course Road, another vestige of the colonial past. These moves were made in tandem in order to dedicate the significant areas (and roads) in the national capital to the people of a free, democratic India where the distinction between the rulers and the ruled, as preferred by the colonialists, was erased. Earlier this year, the government merged the Amar Jawan Jyoti with the flame at the National War Memorial, a few hundred metres away. The Jyoti was first lit as an eternal flame dedicated to India’s soldiers after the victory over Pakistan and birth of Bangladesh as an independent nation. The merger of the flames was meant as a single, dedicated memorial to all of free India’s war martyrs, as distinct from the memorial at India Gate for pre-Independence Indian soldiers who died in the World Wars. The government also announced its decision to install a massive granite statue of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, on his 125th birth anniversary, under the canopy at India Gate. The statue of King George V had been removed from there in 1968 and the space beneath the canopy is at present filled by a hologram depicting Bose.

A year prior to that, Aurangzeb Road in Lutyens’ Delhi was renamed Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Road, a decision that underscored the Modi government’s resolve to end the respect that the key road in the capital accorded to Aurangzeb, one of the most intolerant of Mughal rulers. Indeed, so central to Modi’s vision was the project to decondition the collective Indian consciousness that it was identified as one of the Panch Pran of the Amrit Mahotsav, the 75th year of Indian independence. The decision was announced by the prime minister in his Independence Day speech at the Red Fort. In his address, Modi emphasised the importance of decolonising the minds of Indians and removing the remnants of discrimination and servitude among us. It was in keeping with this that the new naval ensign, kept under wraps till then, was unveiled on September 2 at the commissioning of the indigenous aircraft carrier INS Vikrant. With the addition of Vikrant, India’s war fleet has been catapulted to among the 10 strongest in the world. It was befitting, therefore, that the new flag of the Indian Navy drew from “the rich Indian maritime heritage and [did] away with the colonial past,” according to a statement from the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO).

The most significant part of the decision was doing away completely with St George’s Cross that had dominated the naval flag all these years, with the exception of just a few years along the way. The red cross of St George—a Roman soldier and Christian saint who died in the early 4th century and has been venerated since the Third Crusade of the 12th century—forms the core of both the English flag and the Union Jack, and by extension, of British colonialism. The Indian Navy’s ensign post-Independence had mostly preserved the colonial design that had sported St George’s Cross against a white background, with the Union Jack in the top left corner. On January 26, 1950, the Union Jack was replaced with the Indian Tricolour jack. But St George’s Cross had remained on the naval ensign.

The original suggestion for a change had come from Vice Admiral VEC Barboza, who retired from the Navy as the Flag Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Western Naval Command. But it was only during the tenure of Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s government that St George’s Cross was first removed, in keeping with the then government’s objective of allowing the Indian Navy to own its special heritage and identity. At the time, the naval crest had replaced the cross in the middle of the white flag, with the Tricolour jack remaining in the top left corner. However, St George’s Cross returned to the ensign in 2004, when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) came to power. This was ostensibly because there were complaints that the blue of the naval crest was indistinguishable from the colour of the sea and sky. However, the state emblem, the Lion Capital of Ashoka, was embossed on the red cross. In 2014, the words “Satyameva Jayate”, India’s national motto, were added below the Lion Capital.

The adoption of a new ensign that celebrates the independence and identity of a civilisation, the pride of the Navy in itself, and a self-confident nation has, therefore, to be viewed as central to Modi’s project of instilling new faith and self-esteem in its security forces and among Indian citizens. The new naval ensign is dominated by the symbols of strength, longevity and other attributes drawn from India’s rich maritime past, from the fleets of Shivaji to those of the Cholas.

The Maratha empire, founded by Shivaji in 1674, sported a naval force that included cannons mounted on ships. Kanhoji Angre served as the chief of the western coast from Mumbai to Vingoria. He died in 1729 but until then he had led the attacks on several merchant vessels and cargo ships of the British East India Company. Attempts of the British to defeat Kanhoji failed despite their strong naval force. Later, with its commerce moving to Bombay mainly, this force was renamed as the Bombay Marine which went on to recruit Indian sailors but no Indian officer was commissioned until 1928.

But it wasn’t only the Marathas who had dominated the seas in India’s past. India’s maritime heritage goes back much further. The Cholas, too, used their navy to spread their influence to Southeast Asia. Before the Maratha navy of the 17th and 18th centuries, there was the Marakkar navy under the Zamorins in the 15th century. The ships battled their local rivals and the Europeans.

St George’s Cross dominating the Indian Navy’s ensign for decades after Independence only served to obliterate all of this glorious naval history. It had to go. And Narendra Modi made it a key part of his agenda.

In the eight years of his government, Modi has made it a fundamental part of his vision for New India to exorcise the ghosts of the colonial past in not just tangible but also intangible ways. This was reflected in international relations, with the security apparatus of the country, in the government’s social welfare plans to empower the marginalised and make a clear distinction between essentials for the eligible and freebies for the undeserving, in strengthening the economy, even making India a bigger economy than the UK’s that had dominated the subcontinent for two centuries. His project to decolonise went hand-in-hand with deconditioning the minds of ordinary Indians. The latter included the spelling out of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 which discounts the overt emphasis on English education and seeks to empower the masses of India’s vast interior who speak and communicate in their local languages and are rooted to their culture. Modi’s central vision was based on making Indians aware of their mental servitude and taking pride in their cultural heritage. The decolonisation project is so intrinsic to Modi’s worldview that he projected “an India free of the colonial mindset” as one of the Panch Pran for Amrit Kaal.

The blueprint outlined with Modi’s ascent to the office of prime minister in 2014 has been realised in many ways since. The government parted with the British-era tradition of announcing the Union Budget on the last day of February. Then Finance Minister Arun Jaitley began presenting the Budget on February 1 in 2017. This appeared to be a minor tinkering of the Budget cycle but had a significant impact on the objective of reforming fiscal governance. Also, for the first time, the Rail Budget, traditionally presented before the general Budget, was merged into the latter in 2017.

In the field of art and culture, too, overt symbols of a colonial worldview were done away with. Modi recently inaugurated the Biplobi Bharat Gallery at the Victoria Memorial in Kolkata. The gallery, named after the erstwhile British empress of India, today displays material on the contribution of the revolutionaries to India’s freedom struggle.

Replacing ‘Abide with Me’ in the Beating the Retreat ceremony and adopting a new ensign for the Indian Navy are both part of the tapestry being woven by Modi to liberate Indian minds from the worldview of not only Western colonisers but also those decision-makers of the post-Independence period who copied it. The agenda is to restore and strengthen the morale of the nation that had plummeted to rock bottom by 2014—a time of inefficiency, political appeasement, terrorism, crony capitalism, and blackmail by regional leaders.

Modi succeeded as a widely accepted leader both in 2014 and in 2019, surpassing the expectations of his own supporters in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). He came through as a strong statesman who was proud of the subcontinent’s history, a man with a focused vision for reclaiming India’s past glories and knitting them finely with its future as an emerging but uncompromising leader among nations, markets and economies. He did away with the baggage of insecurity, the inferiority that Indians continued to burden themselves with, thanks mainly to the markers laid down by the likes of Jawaharlal Nehru who preferred an Occidental worldview to that of a self-respecting Indian proud of the subcontinent’s heritage.

On becoming prime minister, Modi acted as a catalyst to stoke this dormant self-esteem, the pride in centuries of culture, and a way of life that lay buried in the consciousness of Indians. His focus on this ensured that those marginalised from India’s decision-making processes—people in the rural hinterlands, those who mainly spoke and studied in the local language—were brought back to the mainstream. With Modi at the helm, the dominant cultural and political narratives began to be transformed, reflecting the voices and sentiments of ordinary Indians. He restored the pride of Indians, not just with decisions like the surgical strike after the Uri attack or the Balakot airstrikes that sent a warning to Pakistan about continued terror attacks, but also with a careful balancing of India’s interests in the Ukraine-Russia conflict, siding with peace and conflict resolution but refusing to toe the American line. To Pakistan, he sent the message that pusillanimity vis-à-vis a nuclear neighbour would not deter the Indian government from retaliating any longer.

At home, his focus was on empowering the economically weak, protecting their lives and livelihoods through the two years of the pandemic. Recently, the Modi government’s determination to strengthen the economy through multiple measures ensured that India shot past the UK as the fifth largest economy.

Modi had unfurled the standard of self-respect and began paving the road to a New India as long ago as January 2014 at New Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan. It was there that he openly challenged the Westernised liberal social order, or the “Idea of India”, entrenched by Nehru that subordinated crores of ordinary Indians.

To Modi—and he made no bones about spelling this out in his address—the true idea of India was one that stemmed from its ancient culture, its respect for all life, its honouring of women, its consideration of the people of the world as one religion of humanity, its respect for the poor and the underprivileged, and its prioritisation of truth as the most powerful weapon. The flame he lit then, the vision he outlined, served to destigmatise those sections of society looked down upon even after Independence. Modi unshackled the average Indian from the existential millstone of colonialism.

The new standards of India, and not just the new ensign of the Navy, draw inspiration from the fundamentals of an ancient civilisation with a rich cultural and religious heritage. They reflect the identity of a New India and showcase the architecture of decolonising and deconditioning that Narendra Modi has envisioned for a rising and powerful nation.

defenceIndian NavyINS VikrantKochinew ensign