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“JAI HIND” or marked absent? In a somewhat bizarre bid to inculcate the feeling of ‘patriotism and love for the country’, Government of India issued a circular on 16 May 2018 Wednesday, making it mandatory for students of over a lakh government schools to answer “Jai Hind” during roll calls. Eight months after the proposal was submitted informally and experimentally on NCC day, October 2017, the BJP government has enforced government schools throughout the country, starting with Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh, to mark students present only when they respond with “Jai Hind”. The change comes in the midst of rising communal tensions countrywide, cross-border conflicts and divided opinions on many other political scenarios that face our nation. The move of replacing the generic “Yes Sir/Ma’am” or “upasthit hain” (present) with “Jai Hind” will certainly remind students every morning of the struggles of the twentieth century, it seems.
While many have taken the government to task via social media for their forced nationalism given their history of historical erasure and Hindutva pride over the last three years, we still felt it was worthwhile to explore the history of the term itself, divorced from its current political context.
JAI BHARAT MATA KI or JAI HIND?
“Jai Hind” came to be in 1941 when Zain-ul Abideen Hasan coined the slogan in Germany, where he was studying engineering. He had joined forces with Subhash Chandra Bose who was also in Germany understanding military tactics for forming Azad Hind Fauj which was preparing itself for independence struggle back home. During the making of the Fauj, Zain as Bose’s secretary and the interpreter came up with the slogan.
The duo circumnavigating around the problem of Indian military regiments divided on the basis of religious ethnicities, realised that while “Bharat Mata Ki Jai” was fairly neutral for most, it didn’t quite sit well with the Sikh regiment who chose “Sat Sri Akal”, the Rajputana regiment who shouted “Jai Ram ji ki”, or the Muslim regiment who greeted with “Salaam Alaikum”. Bose and Hasan saw this as a key turning point. Jai Hind” became a uniting war cry.
Hasan had come upon two Rajputana cadets who greeted him with “Jai Ram ji ki”. This sparked the idea of why not “Jai Hindustan ki”? Later abridged into “Jai Hind,” the slogan became inclusive and stuck in the minds of every soldier of Azad Hind Fauj. After Independence, Hasan joined the newly-formed Indian Foreign Services and took on the surname Safrani (after the saffron colour in the Indian flag). The slogan then proved succinct yet impactful.
The Current Context
While the agenda behind this move remains unclear, the teachers and ministers are already reporting a change in body languages of students. How they have come to this conclusion in less than a week is known only to them because they have offered little in the way of data or reasoning to back this claim up. It wouldn’t be a far stretch to say that this is the pattern of a BJP government who are incredibly quick to spread extreme rhetoric without basis and rarely refute when challenged.
The government’s particular brand of forced patriotism has not gone unnoticed. Right from issues with movie-goers not standing up for the national anthem in cinema halls (in one case, a disabled man was beaten up in Goa for not doing so) to the attempted erasure of the Mughal Empire from our history books amidst other efforts to ‘saffronise education,’ the brand seems to push for a unity that is anything but secular.
Other incidents that run in the same vein leading up to this decision include but are not limited to the expulsion of three students in Kerala for not singing the national anthem, the forced writing of ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’ in students’ application forms for Shree Patel Vidhyarthi Ashram Trust which operates two high schools, a primary school and a college in the region that have more than 1,500 students.
No matter the historical context, the BJP government must remember that while the constitution grants every citizen the right to freedom of speech, it also provides citizens with the right to remain silent.
Jai Hind indeed.
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