May 25, 2020
The Indian Flag: Explained
India has historically been one of the most diverse countries on earth. Ever since the beginning of time, India has been an example to the rest of the world of how people of different religions (primarily Hindus and Muslims) can live side by side with infrequent and minor conflicts. And ever since the 1850s, different movements swept across India that begged independence from the dominant British.
The Indian National Congress first convened in December of 1885. By the 20th century, the institution’s focus shifted to the process of boycotting British goods coming into the subcontinent. When Gandhi came into power, the institution had already become well-established within British India and needed a unifying symbol. This is where the Indian flag comes into play.
To-be designer Pingali Venkayya was an active fighter for Indian freedom from the present-day province of Andhra Pradesh in India’s southeast. A student at the time, Venkayya presented a design of an Indian flag to Gandhi. The two met in Africa where Venkayya served for the British Military.
In 1916, Pingali published a book offering thirty designs of what a possible Flag of India could look like. Gandhi finally approved the flag still in use today in Vijayawada in 1921. The design consists of green, symbolizing India’s Muslim population, and red, symbolizing its Hindu majority. In the center, is a spinning wheel which “was associated with Gandhi’s crusade to make Indians self-reliant by fabricating their own clothing from local fibres.”
However, Gandhi did not use Pingali’s exact design and instead added a white stripe to advocate for minority religious communities inside India. In the city of Nagpur, now the size of Chicago, the design was carried at protests and led to the arrests of thousands of people. The flag was officially recognized by all Indians in the Congress Party in 1931.
Eventually, Great Britain agreed to consider granting independence to India but refused to do it properly. A line was drawn up based on religious majority by a British lawyer who had no previous knowledge of India’s people and history but he completed his task of dividing India into two countries over the course of weeks. This created the nations of India and Pakistan.
The flag drawn up by Congress would become India’s national flag but a new flag needed to be drawn up for Pakistan which then included present-day Bangladesh. Muslim Indians founded the All India Muslim League in 1906 which advocated for creating a separate state outside of India which would have an Islamic majority.
The League held their first meeting in Dhaka, which is the capital of Bangladesh today, and was formerly a part of India and later East Pakistan. The first flag was approved here in 1906. The flag was later redesigned by Syed Kedwaii who was from India’s northwest, which is now a part of Punjab and Uttar Pradesh. He joined the party in the late 1930s and eventually immigrated alongside many to Lahore.
The Pakistani flag shows a green background with a white star and crescent symbol which are widely recognized as Islamic religious symbols. The color green goes back far in history to the era of the prophet Mohammed who wore a green cloak and turban. Green was his favorite color. The Koran also claims that green is the color of paradise.
The crescent on the other hand, did not originate as a symbol of Islam, but, originated as a symbol of the Ottoman Empire which led the crescent moon to spread to other predominantly Islamic countries where it quickly grew an original traditional meaning. Even today, Muslims do not consider the crescent moon and star to be sacred and holy. It represents progress in the faith but is more based on ethnic meanings than on Islamic tradition.
At midnight, at the first minute, of the 15th of August 1947, the nations of Pakistan and India declared their independence from Britain. A white stripe was added to the Pakistani flag to symbolize its diversity of minority communities and since then the flag has not been altered. The Indian spinning wheel was replaced by a blue chakra.
The Dharma Chakra is associated with the emperor Ashoka who was the first to attempt to unite India under a single Government. On Independence Day, hundreds of thousands of Sikhs and Hindus left their homes in present-day Pakistan and Bangladesh for India and hundreds of thousands of Muslims left their homes in present-day India for present-day Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Along their journey, violence and rapes occurred, Hindus attacked Muslims; Muslims attacked Hindus. People were separated based on their religion, their faith. For the first time, Indians and Pakistanis began to murder each other just because they were different. Thousands of people lay dead, babies and elders, young women, and old men. People who never knew each other were willing to end each other’s lives. Many didn’t make it to their new homes. Some stayed behind. People who had lived side by side for centuries with no conflict had started a chain of hatred and arrogance towards the other side.
Whole villages were set aflame and today Indian and Pakistani Partition looms over the two countries as a sort of haunting dark cloud. By 1948, an estimated fifteen million people had left their homes and two million died as a result of the violence.
Today, Independence Day is celebrated all throughout India especially in Delhi where a big parade is held. Either way, this story has not ended yet. After the 1970 Pakistani Election, East Pakistan’s majority Bengali Muslim population was not happy that Bengali Prime Minister-elect Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was prevented from coming into power in Pakistan.
Protests and uprisings arose across East Pakistan and the violence quickly grew into a desire for Bengali independence. For the first time, a Bengali flag was held up on the 25th of March, 1971 after which Pakistan invaded East Pakistan and arrested Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and exiled him to Karachi.
Back to flags, Bangladesh’s flag was designed by a Bengali nationalist group known as the Awami League. The Bangladesh flag was designed by a student named Serajual Alam and originally showed a map of Pakistan but was later altered to show a red disk with a green background to symbolize the Muslim faith and the rich vegetation of the Bengali land.
Eventually, Bangladesh declared independence from Pakistan with the help of India, and this is how one Indian flag which united India, became the flag of a smaller but more powerful India, and more flags were designed by more designers in places that were previously Indian but have separated into other states.
This is a sad story about how one people was separated into three and divided by their politics and faiths. How people who were friends have learned to hate each other.
