Essay · Section A23 September 2026

Obedience can be commanded; loyalty has to be earned.

In 1985, three children in a Kerala school, Bijoe, Binu Mol and Bindu Emmanuel, stood up every morning when the National Anthem was sung. They stood in silence, because their faith as Jehovah’s Witnesses did not allow them to sing it. For this they were expelled. In August 1986 the Supreme Court ordered them readmitted. Standing respectfully, it held, was no insult to the anthem, and no law compelled anyone to sing. Justice O. Chinnappa Reddy ended the judgment with a line that Indian law students still learn: “Our tradition teaches tolerance; our philosophy preaches tolerance; our Constitution practises tolerance; let us not dilute it.” The children were not disloyal. They gave the state everything it could fairly ask for, their presence and their respect, and refused only the one thing it could not take: words their conscience did not believe.

The case shows a distinction that every government has to learn. Obedience is conduct produced by the threat of a penalty. It lasts as long as someone is watching. Loyalty is allegiance given freely, and it lasts when nobody is watching. A state needs both. But force can produce only the first. Loyalty is a return on fairness. It grows when power explains itself, respects the limits of conscience and treats the citizen as a partner rather than a suspect. When a state tries to command loyalty directly, it usually ends up with less of both.

History makes the point well. On 23 September 1918, cavalry from Jodhpur and Mysore charged up the slopes of Mount Carmel and took Haifa for the British Empire. More than a million Indians served overseas in that war. Gandhi himself toured Kheda in 1918 urging villagers to enlist. Few empires have commanded such obedience from a subject people. Within months came the Rowlatt Act, which allowed detention without trial, and then the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh in April 1919. Tagore gave up his knighthood, and by 1920 the Non-Cooperation Movement had begun. An empire that could send men into a cavalry charge could not keep the loyalty of the people those men came from. Coercion had used it up.

Literature has always understood this. Sophocles’ Antigone buries her brother against King Creon’s decree, appealing to unwritten laws older than any king. In his 1849 essay on civil disobedience, Henry David Thoreau asked, “Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator?” When the Inquisition made Galileo recant in 1633, it got a signature. The story that he muttered “and yet it moves” is almost certainly a legend, but it has lasted because everyone understands that a confession taken under threat proves nothing except the power of the person who took it. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four takes the idea to its end. The Party is not satisfied with Winston’s obedience; it wants his love. To get it, it has to destroy him, and the novel ends with the chilling line: “He loved Big Brother.” Compelled love needs the lover to be broken first.

Constitutional democracies have learnt the same lesson in their courts. In 1940 the United States Supreme Court allowed schools to make children salute the flag. Three years later, after a wave of violence against Jehovah’s Witnesses, it reversed itself in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette. Justice Robert Jackson warned that “compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.” India now faces a version of the same question. Vande Mataram carried the freedom movement. In 1937 the Congress Working Committee chose its first two stanzas for national gatherings, and on 24 January 1950 Rajendra Prasad told the Constituent Assembly that it would be honoured equally with Jana Gana Mana. The song won that place because people sang it freely, often under lathi blows. A law that threatens prison for those who, on grounds of faith, will not sing all six stanzas risks cheapening the very devotion it wants to protect. The Supreme Court Bench hearing the challenge has drawn the right line, at least orally: the state may choose the symbol, but it cannot punish a conscientious objector.

The same principle governs institutions from the inside. Since 1993 the Election Commission has been a multi-member body, and the law asks it to act unanimously where possible and by majority otherwise. The Supreme Court upheld this collegial design in T.N. Seshan v. Union of India in 1995. Reports that two Election Commissioners recorded fourteen written objections in ten months, to orders issued in the Commission’s name without their knowledge, matter for this reason. A dissenting note is not disloyalty. It is the most loyal thing a member can do for an institution whose authority depends on voters believing that it deliberates. The Supreme Court’s ruling that the Uttar Pradesh Gangsters Act was “still-born” rests on the same ground. A crime, it held, must be created by the legislature, not by a police gang chart. Max Weber argued that modern authority is legitimate when people believe in the legality of rules made through a known procedure. Take away the procedure, and all that is left is command.

The counter-position deserves a fair hearing. Thomas Hobbes wrote in Leviathan in 1651 that without a power able to compel, human life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” All law is coercive at root. Taxes are not voluntary, and no state waits for a burglar’s consent. Compulsion can also come before loyalty and produce it. Article 17 abolished untouchability by command, not by persuasion, and Aristotle argued that we become just by doing just acts, so habits formed under law can become convictions. The Constitution itself, in Article 51A(a), asks citizens to respect the flag and the anthem. In the 1948 debate on the uniform civil code, K.M. Munshi argued that a state which waits for every community to agree to reform may wait forever while women pay the price.

These objections are serious, but they prove a narrower point than they claim. What compulsion can legitimately secure is conduct that protects other people: not stealing, not discriminating, not insulting what others hold dear. Such compulsion turns into loyalty only when the rule is fair, made by the right body and openly explained. The law against untouchability earned allegiance because it gave dignity to people who had been denied it. A compelled chorus gives nothing to anyone. Even on the civil code, Ambedkar told the Assembly that a future Parliament might make adherence “purely voluntary”, and the Special Marriage Act of 1954 already offers a secular code to anyone who chooses it. Reform that invites people in lasts longer than reform that forces them.

For an administrator, the lesson is practical. Every order draws on a reserve of public trust. Command draws that reserve down; fairness, explanation and respect for conscience fill it up again. The Emmanuel children understood this better than the officials who expelled them. Their silent standing, morning after morning, showed more respect than a chorus sung out of fear. A republic that is sure of itself asks for obedience to its laws, and then waits, patiently and without threats, to be loved.