New Delhi: The Congress has said that the party will hoist the national flag on 30 January — the concluding day of the Bharat Jodo Yatra — at its headquarters in Srinagar and not Lal Chowk. The yatra, in its last leg, entered Jammu and Kashmir Thursday.
Making the announcement, Rajni Patil, All India Congress Committee (AICC) in-charge for J&K Tuesday said that unfurling the national flag at Lal Chowk is a part of “RSS’ agenda”.
“We do not believe in the RSS’ (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) agenda of hoisting the tricolour at Lal Chowk, where it has already flown high,” she said. The venue for flag-hoisting — Jammu and Kashmir Pradesh Congress Committee (JKPCC) headquarters — is on Maulana Azad Road, less than a kilometre away from Lal Chowk.
Lal Chowk is the main square in Srinagar. Located in the heart of the city, it is surrounded by parks, schools and media offices. On a normal day, Lal Chowk buzzes with activity, but on some days, there are barbed wires in and around it.
And while the RSS, BJP’s ideological fountainhead, has not spoken of an “agenda” involving flag-hoisting at Lal Chowk, its workers — who have gone on to hold prominent positions in the BJP — have made the act a symbol of nationalism.
Earlier this month, party’s Ludhiana MP Ravneet Bittu had said that the yatra will conclude with flag hoisting at Lal Chowk. “Rahul Gandhi started the yatra from Kanyakumari and will be hoisting the flag on January 30 at Lal Chowk, Srinagar,” he said.
The Congress’ stance against hoisting the flag at Lal Chowk is curious, given that it was Rahul Gandhi’s great grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru who, along with Sheikh Abdullah, had first unfurled the tricolour at Lal Chowk in 1948. Following that, at a rally in the presence of Nehru, the Kashmiri leader had recited a Persian couplet, “Tu mann shudam, mann tu shudi, taqas na goyed, mann degram, tu degari” (I became you and you became I, no one can say we are separate’).
Speaking to ThePrint Thursday, Patil sought to play down her comment. “Pandit Nehru unfurled the national flag. (But) since the 1990s, first (BJP’s) Murli Manohar Joshi unfurled the national flag at Lal Chowk. Then Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley came but were stopped. The national flag can be unfurled anywhere. What I meant was that when our office is in Lal Chowk, why do we need to go there separately?” she said.
“We have to keep an eye on the national flag. How will we do that in Lal Chowk? Why should we go into RSS agendas like Lal Chowk and Article 370? We have come with the message of peace,” Patil added.
BJP says that hoisting the national flag at Lal Chowk is in itself a statement “in favour of nationalistic forces”. Speaking to ThePrint, BJP spokesperson Sunil Sethi said, “It is a matter of pride for Indians if the national flag flies at Lal Chowk, which was the nerve centre of separatism. They (Congress) were the ones who created such conditions for their political benefits over the past 70 years, giving separatists and anti-nationals a free hand in Lal Chowk and such nerve centres of Kashmir. This is not just an agenda of RSS but of all Indians.”
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History of Lal Chowk
Since India gained independence, Lal Chowk has been host to many political events.
Lal Chowk was given its name by B.P.L. Bedi — actor Kabir Bedi’s father and a confidant of Sheikh Abdullah — in the 1940s. Inspired by the Russian revolution, he had named it after Moscow’s Red Square.
In 1980, Bajaj Electricals built a clock tower at the chowk, which has over the years become a centre of political activity. When Sheikh Abdullah signed the Indira-Sheikh Accord in 1975 with then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi — which allowed him to re-enter politics and became the chief minister of J&K — it was at Lal Chowk that he addressed a massive crowd and explained the accord.
At the peak of militancy in the 1990s, Lal Chowk was witness to bomb attacks, firings, rocket attacks. In those dark days, even a Pakistani flag could be spotted at Lal Chowk on some days, and rallies by militants and separatists were also not uncommon.
Tiranga yatras over the years
At the peak of militancy in Jammu and Kashmir in 1992, then BJP president Murli Manohar Joshi, along with Narendra Modi, who was the party’s yatra convenor at the time, unfurled the national flag at Lal Chowk on 26 January, marking the successful completion of the party’s Ekta Yatra from Kanyakumari to Kashmir.
With militants issuing warnings against the yatra, joined by thousands of workers, it had to be stopped in Jammu. Joshi, Modi and a few others were airlifted to Srinagar, reportedly on the “pretext“ of landslides on the Jammu-Srinagar highway.
In 2011, another yatra, this time by the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM) was launched from Kolkata. Led by the party’s then youth wing president Anurag Thakur, the yatra’s final destination was Lal Chowk. Senior leaders, including Arun Jaitley, Sushma Swaraj and Ananth Kumar, tried to enter J&K to join the yatra but were arrested for violating Section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure Code (prohibiting gathering of four or more people) that was in force at the time.
While Jaitley had then reiterated that they will hoist the national flag at the Lal Chowk, the yatra failed to reach its destination. At the time of their arrest, Swaraj had said, “Why are we being arrested? We were marching peacefully. Those who burn the national flag are being provided security while those holding it are being stopped.”
Much before this, though, a lesser known local leader, Yogesh Gupta of Akhil Bharatiya Shiv Sena, boasts of having hoisted the national flag at Lal Chowk for five successive years beginning 1994.
According to Gupta, he along with few other people had to sneak past security forces to unfurl the national flag on 26 January, 1994, after they were initially detained in Udhampur.
Similar attempts to reach Srinagar on “tiranga yatras” are not unheard of. In 2016, over a hundred youths on bikes were stopped at Lakhanpur by the police when they were trying to enter the state in order to unfurl the national flag at the National Institute of Technology (NIT), Srinagar.
The group — raising slogans of “Bharat Mata ki Jai” and “Jahan hue balidan Mukherjee woh Kashmir humara hai” (the Kashmir where Shyama Prasad Mukherjee was martyred is ours) — was led by Tajinder Pal Singh Bagga, then a leader of Bhagat Singh Kranti Dal. Bagga is BJYM national secretary and a Delhi BJP leader.
A year later in 2017, about a hundred people from Sonipat, with an aim to unfurl the national flag at Lal Chowk, were stopped at Samba in Jammu. Their Tiranga yatra was also not allowed to go any further.
The most recent political flag-hoisting event at Lal Chowk was held last year, amid tight security, led by BJYM national president Tejasvi Surya. To mark the Kargil Vijay Diwas, bikers from across the country carried out a Tiranga Bikers yatra from Lal Chowk to Kargil.
“In 1992, Shri Narendra modi Ji had unfurled the National Flag at Lal Chowk during ‘Ekta Yatra’ led by Shri Murali Manohar Joshi. 30 years later, thanks to the abrogation of Article 370 by Modi Ji & HM Sri Amit Shah Ji, BJYM unfurled Tiranga At Lal Chowk today,” wrote Surya after the flag hoisting in 2022.
(Edited by Smriti Sinha)
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