The Karnataka High Court dismissed a Public Interest Litigation challenging a Ministry of Home Affairs circular directing schools to have students sing all six stanzas of 'Vande Mataram', with the Division Bench of Chief Justice Vibhu Bakru and Justice C.M. Poonacha ruling that the advisory carries no legal force, and therefore no justiciable threat to constitutional rights.
The petition, filed by advocate Somashekar Rajavamshi, took aim at the MHA's protocol document titled 'Orders Relating to the National Song of India', published on the Ministry's official website in February. Rajavamshi argued that Stanza 5 of the national song explicitly invokes Hindu deities, Durga, Vani (Saraswati), and Kamala (Lakshmi), and that compelling its recitation in schools would corrode the secular foundation of the Constitution. He sought to restrict the officially recognised version to the first two stanzas.
The Ministry pushed back through the Additional Solicitor General, who clarified that the circular was purely advisory in character, using permissive rather than directive language, and that no school was under any legal obligation to have students sing the song daily.
The Bench anchored its reasoning firmly in statutory interpretation, zeroing in on the operative word in the circular. Chief Justice Bakru noted orally, "The word 'may' is used. There are no penal or adverse consequences. Nobody has asked that you do it in your academy." The Court further held that the petitioner's concerns about social ostracism of those who declined to sing were insufficiently substantiated, characterising them as "vague", and that without any prescribed penalty or enforceable obligation, the challenge was legally "premature."
The PIL was accordingly dismissed. Notably, the Supreme Court had reached an identical conclusion just a month prior, declining a similar petition on the same grounds.
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