Judgment

CHINNAPPA REDDY, J. : - The three child appellants, Bijoe, Binu Mot and Bindu Emmanuel, are the faithful of Jehovahs Witnesses. They attend school. Daily, during the morning Assembly, when the National Anthem Jana Gana Mana is sung, they stand respectfully but they do not sing. They do not sing because, according to them, it is against the tenets of their religious faith not the words or the thoughts of the Anthem but the singing of it. This they and before them their elder sisters who attended the same school earlier have done all these several years. No one bothered, No one worried. No one thought it disrespectful or unpatriotic. The children were left in peace and to their beliefs. That was until July, 1985, when some patriotic gentleman took notice. The gentleman thought it was unpatriotic of the children not to sing the National Anthem. He happened to be a Member of the Legislative Assembly. So, he put a question in the Assembly. A Commission was appointed to enquire and report. We do not have the report of the Commission. We are told that the Commission reported that the children are law-abiding and that they showed no disrespect to the National Anthem. Indeed it is nobodys case that the children are other than well-behaved or that they have ever behaved disrespectfully when the National Anthem was sung. They have always stood up in respectful silence. But these matters of conscience, which though better left alone, are sensitive and emotionally evocative. So, under the instructions of Deputy Inspector of Schools, the Head Mistress expelled the children from the school from July 26, 1985, The father of the children made representations requesting that his children may be permitted to attend the school pending orders from the Government. The Head Mistress expressed her helplessness in the matter. Finally the children filed a Writ Petition in the High Court seeking an order restraining the authorities from preventing them from attending School. First a learned single Judge and then a Division Bench rejected the prayer of the children. They have now come before us by special leave under Art. 136 of the Constitution.

2. We are afraid the High Court misdirected itself and went off at a tangent. They considered, in minute detail, each and every word and thought of the National Anthem and concluded that there was no word or thought in the National Anthem which could offend anyones religious susceptibilities. But that is not the question at all. The objection of the petitioners is not to the language or the sentiments of the National Anthem : they do not sing the National Anthem wherever, Jana Gana Mana in India, God save the Queen in Britain, the Star-spangled banner in the United States and so on. In their words in the Writ Petition they say, "The students who are Witnesses do not sing the Anthem though they stand up on such occasions to show their respect to the National Anthem. They desist from actual singing only because of their honest belief and conviction that their religion does not permit them to join any rituals except it be in their prayers to Jehovah their God."

3. That the petitioners truly and conscientiously believe what they say is not in doubt. They do not hold their beliefs idly and their conduct is not the outcome of any perversity. The petitioners have not asserted these beliefs for the first time or out of any unpatriotic sentiment. Jehovahs Witnesses as they call themselves, appear to have always expressed and stood up for such beliefs all the world over as we shall presently show. Jehovahs Witnesses and their peculiar beliefs though little noticed in this country, have been noticed, we find, in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and have been the subject of judicial pronouncements elsewhere.

4. In The New Encyclopaedia. Britannica (Macropaedia) Vol. 10 page 538, after mentioning that Jehovahs Witnesses are "the adherents of the apocalyptic sect organized by Charles Taze Russell in the early 1870", it is