> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.theredlighthouse.org/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # In Kohima They Stayed in Their Seats for One Song and Stood for the Next. I Have Never Once Asked What I Was Standing For. - URL: https://www.theredlighthouse.org/discerner-vande-mataram-kohima/ - Published: 2026-08-21T09:09:52.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-21T09:09:52.000Z - Description: India made its national song compulsory. In Nagaland a crowd worked out what it could and could not do with its body in public. - Author: The Red Lighthouse - Tags: The Discerner, News Stories I stand for things. I stand at ballgames with my hand somewhere near my heart. I stood at a Rotary lunch last spring while a man I had never met asked God to bless the sales quarter, and I stood at a wedding for a poem I thought was bad, and I stood at a school assembly in a folding chair that caught the back of my knee. I could not tell you the words to most of it. Standing was simply the thing the room did, and I did the thing the room did, and I have never once, in forty years of standing up, asked what I was agreeing to. On August 15, in Kohima, several thousand people asked. It was India's eightieth Independence Day. At Secretariat Plaza, where the state holds its main celebration, the programme called for two pieces of music. When the first one played, a great many people in that crowd stayed in their seats. When the second one played, they stood. ## The song and the anthem The song is Vande Mataram, written by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee in the 1870s and folded into his novel *Anandamath*. It means, roughly, I bow to thee, Mother. It was sung by people walking into British lathis, and it belongs to the independence movement as surely as anything does. The trouble is not the first two verses, which are about rivers and orchards and a country worth loving. The trouble is what comes after. The later stanzas name the mother directly as Durga, as Lakshmi, as Saraswati, and ask the singer to bow. That is not patriotic imagery borrowed from religion. That is an act of worship with a country's name in it. The anthem is Jana Gana Mana, Tagore's, and it is the one with constitutional standing. In Kohima the crowd stood for that one. For eighty years the practical compromise held: the anthem at official occasions, the song at cultural ones, and usually only its first two stanzas. This year the compromise ended, and here our two sources do not agree on how. UCA News reports a federal directive issued on January 28 requiring all six stanzas at official and cultural events across every state. International Christian Concern reports that Parliament amended the law in its August session to raise the song to the level of the anthem, with penalties for states that do not comply. Those may be two moves in one campaign. They may be one thing described loosely. We do not know, and we are not going to pretend to. What is not in dispute is the result. On August 15, from the ramparts of the Red Fort, for the first time in eighty years, the song was sung before the anthem. ## The people who sat down The Naga Students' Federation had called for a boycott of any celebration where the full version would play. Its president, Mteisuding Heraang, told UCA News his people put volunteers around Kohima specifically to keep students out of the singing. A former president, Kegwayhun Tep, said the protest held across the state, and noted a small telling detail: this year's parade contingents were thinner, because the student and institutional groups were not in them. The Nagaland Baptist Church Council had said much the same on August 13, in a statement from its general secretary, the Rev. Dr. Mar Pongener, and its secretary for social concern, Dr. Villo Naleo. The council went out of its way to say it respects India's national symbols and its constitutional values. Then it said the thing that is actually at stake. Patriotism must never be reduced to compulsory conformity. Which is a sentence I would like to say I would have arrived at on my own. ## The plain of Dura There is an old story about this, and it is not subtle. A king sets up an image on a plain, and the instruction is not that anyone must believe anything. The instruction is about music. When you hear the horn and the pipe and the lyre, fall down. That is all. Nobody is asked what they think. The genius of the arrangement is that thinking is not required, and the three who stay standing are not punished for heresy. They are punished for posture. Americans have our own smaller version, and we lost it in a schoolroom before we won it back. In 1943, in *West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette*, the Court considered children who would not salute a flag, and Justice Jackson wrote that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox and force citizens to confess it by word or act. He wrote that in the middle of a war, which is when such a rule is worth exactly what it costs. I do not think the sitting in Kohima was primarily a protest. I think it was arithmetic. Six stanzas, three goddesses, one bow, and a Christian population working out what it can and cannot do with its body in public. They found the line in a place I have never had to look for it, because nobody has ever asked me to sing anything. ## What I am carrying out of this Not outrage. Outrage is cheap this week and I have plenty of it stockpiled for other things. What I am carrying is the folding chair, and the sales quarter prayer, and the forty years of standing up without checking. Compulsion is easy to see when it arrives with penalties attached and stanzas about goddesses. It is nearly invisible when it arrives as the thing the room is doing. The people in Secretariat Plaza had the second kind for eighty years and only noticed when it turned into the first. They stood for one and not the other, and they could tell you exactly why. I would like to be able to tell you why, the next time I stand. --- ### Sources - UCA News, "Student body opposes imposition of 'national song' in India's Nagaland," August 19, 2026 (reporting interviews conducted August 18). [ucanews.com](https://www.ucanews.com/news/student-body-opposes-imposition-of-national-song-in-indias-nagaland/114850?ref=theredlighthouse.org) - International Christian Concern, "Church in India Opposes Singing of Controversial National Song," August 18, 2026\. [persecution.org](https://persecution.org/2026/08/18/church-in-india-opposes-singing-of-controversial-national-song/?ref=theredlighthouse.org) - *West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette*, 319 U.S. 624 (1943).