Yoga on, Sunday gone: On World Yoga Day, Maharashtra govt expects all schools to remain open

The Maharashtra government on Tuesday issued a circular for all schools in Mumbai telling them to be stay open on 21 June – a Sunday – to celebrate World Yoga Day, a  Hindustan Times  report said. The government has formed a panel of experts who will suggest different ways to celebrate the day, the report added.

The United Nations declared 21 June as World Yoga Day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi had urged the world community to celebrate Indian yoga at the international level in his speech at the United Nations General Assembly in September last.

While a few schools welcomed the announcement, a few others had a problem with the fact that the state government planned the celebrations on a Sunday. Father Francis Swamy, coordinator of the Jesuit School Board and manager of St Xavier’s High School in Fort was quoted as saying, “Sunday will be difficult for Catholic schools especially because we have church service on that day.”

Although government officials said that no schools were bound to do anything on the World Yoga Day, they also added that the state government “expected them (schools) to follow it.”

The initiative to celebrate World Yoga Day is an addition to a long list of all the other special holidays which are already celebrated in city schools. This is not the first time that the government has made an attempt to keep schools open on a public holiday.

Last December, the Union HRD Ministry had faced flak over its attempts to celebrate Christmas as the Good Governance Day. CBSE schools were told to remain open on Christmas to celebrate the birthday of Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Hindu Mahasabha leader Madan Mohan Malviya.

The attempt had sparked a debate among leaders on how these were “communal designs” of the BJP government to target minority holidays. Speaking to Firstpost, John Dayal, national secretary of All India Catholic Union and national convenor of the United Christian Forum for Human Rights, had at theat time said, “After attempting to appropriate the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi and Sardar Patel, the Modi government has now set an eye on Christmas Day.”

Even though, Maharashtra government’s attempts to observe World Yoga Day on 21 June is not as controversial as Good Governance Day, schools still feel that since Sunday is a holiday, 21 June should be treated as a working day.

The World Yoga Day announcement sounds similar to the way the BJP government decided to celebrate Teacher’s Day. A public holiday, Teacher’s Day has forever been the day children look forward to. But the Modi government decided to cut off all the fanfare around the holiday and instead made the children sit and watch a speech by Prime Minister  Narendra Modi.

Like Firstpost Editor Sandip Roy argues in this article, “The whole Teachers’ Day pep talk by Narendra Modi quickly got stuck in a similar controversy of voluntary vs mandatory. Modi’s national Teacher’s Day telecast was also quite simply an exercise in power. He was not just the kindly PM stopping by for a meet-and-greet with students at a particular school. When the PM gives Teacher’s Day a makeover in his own image it sends a signal.”