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IN JANUARY 2002, THROUGH A UNION cabinet-sponsored revision of the fifty-year-old Flag Code of India, the Indian state eased its restrictions on civilian displays of the national flag and allowed its citizens to fly the flag every day of the year. The cabinet decision responded to a seven-year legal battle between the Indian state and Navin Jindal, the owner of a steel manufacturing family conglomerate. Jindal's personal quest to return the flag to the Indian people began when he was an MBA student at the University of Texas in Houston in the early 1990s and was struck by the ubiquitous presence of the U.S. flag. Upon becoming president of the student government at the university, Jindal was gifted a large nylon tricolor flag (the Indian national flag), which he proudly flew alongside the Stars and Stripes in his office throughout his four-year stay in the U.S. As Jindal recalled a decade later, "It was the first time I had held my country's flag. It felt great" (Menon 2002).
Jindal's first communion with a nationalist symbol thus occurred outside his homeland. This dislocation became especially significant to him when he was prohibited by the Indian state from replicating that experience upon his return to India in 1994.' Later that year, Jindal filed a writ of petition in the Delhi High Court to protest this decision, deploying legal arguments2 about the fundamental right of all Indian citizens to their national symbols. The case eventually reached the Indian Supreme Court, which issued a favorable verdict in January 2002. Shortly before this apex judicial decision, the union government accepted the recommendations of its Flag Code Committee and announced a revised code that liberalized the display of the flag. Starting on January 26, 2002, exactly fifty-two years after the Indian republic was constituted, Indian citizens had the freedom to fly their flag whenever they wish (except between sunset and sunrise). According to the terms of the new Flag Code, patriotism is now subject to relatively minor restrictions, such as not flying the flag upside down, not trailing it in water, not using it to decorate cushions, napkins, handkerchiefs, or any dress material and not using it as a receptacle for receiving, delivering, holding, or carrying anything.3
Why did Jindal's legal...