On 1 November 2026, at the 71^st Kannada Rajyotsava, Karnataka Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar hoisted the red-and-yellow Kannada flag beside the Tricolour. The State, he said, would bring in a legal framework to give the flag official status and to regulate its display. Press reports describe three measures under consideration: official State flag status, compulsory hoisting at government offices and State-supported institutions, and an order encouraging private organisations to fly the flag.

The proposal is still at an early stage, but the question is not new. In 2018, an earlier Karnataka government sent a redesigned State flag to the Union for approval. That approval was never granted, and a later State government dropped the proposal in 2019. The familiar debate of unity versus identity may therefore be the less useful place to start. A narrower question serves better here: what can Karnataka lawfully do with a flag, leaving aside whether it may have one at all?

A Silence, Not A Prohibition

The text is the place to begin. The Constitution does not mention State flags. Article 51A(a) asks citizens to respect the National Flag but, on its face, does not forbid any other. The Seventh Schedule has no entry on flags. The two statutes that protect the Tricolour, the Emblems and Names (Prevention of Improper Use) Act, 1950 and the Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act, 1971, deal with the National Flag, and neither appears to address whether other flags may exist.

The one official precedent points in both directions. Jammu and Kashmir had its own flag from 1952 to 2019, which suggests that a State flag and the Union can coexist. That flag, however, rested on the State's separate constitution and on Article 370, a position no other State has held. The frequent claim that S.R. Bommai v. Union of India (1994) recognised a State's right to a flag also deserves caution. The judgment dealt with Article 356, and the attribution is hard to trace to its text.

Karnataka's own practice offers a closer analogy. The State adopted Kuvempu's 'Jaya Bharata Jananiya Tanujate' as its State anthem by executive order and later prescribed its tune and duration. When that prescription was challenged, the Karnataka High Court dismissed the petition, holding that the government had acted within its executive power. In August 2026, the Supreme Court declined to interfere, noting the need for uniformity in how a State anthem is rendered. If a State may adopt and regulate its own anthem, there appears to be little reason why it may not adopt a flag for its own use. Union approval would then matter mainly where the State wants something only the Union can give, such as a place for its flag in the central statutory scheme. That is what the 2018 request sought.

Article 29(1) of the Constitution of India is sometimes invoked in support. It protects the right of any section of citizens with a distinct language, script or culture to conserve it. That right, however, belongs to citizens rather than to the State, and it does not obviously give the State power to require others to fly a flag.

Where The National Flag Sets The Limits

Any recognition would have to work within the rules that govern the Tricolour. The Flag Code of India, 2002 provides that no other flag should be placed higher than or above the National Flag or, except where the Code specifically allows it, side by side with it, and that different flags should be flown from separate mast-heads. At the Rajyotsava ceremony, the Kannada flag flew from a separate and visibly lower staff. A framework for display “alongside” the Tricolour would, it seems, have to mean this arrangement.

The legal status of these rules matters here. In Union of India v. Naveen Jindal, (2004) 2 SCC 510, the Supreme Court held that flying the National Flag with dignity is a form of expression under Article 19(1)(a). It also held that the Flag Code, being a set of executive instructions, is not “law” that can restrict that right, though its norms on dignity deserve to be followed.

Two consequences follow. A State framework that ignored the Code's dignity norms would likely invite challenge, whatever the Code's formal status. And if flying a flag is a form of expression, being required to fly one may engage the same right.

Three Settings, Three Answers

Government offices. When the State flies its own flag on its own buildings, the State itself is communicating, and no individual is asked to affirm anything. The State anthem litigation is consistent with this: the High Court accepted that the government could prescribe the anthem's rendition at its own functions in exercise of executive power under Article 162 (Kikkeri Krishna Murthy v. State of Karnataka, Karnataka High Court, April 2024). A direction to State offices to fly a recognised flag in a subordinate position is therefore likely to be the least contested part of the proposal.

State-aided institutions. The same litigation offers a possible template. The State had narrowed its order to aided schools and government functions, and the High Court upheld it, noting, with reference to Bijoe Emmanuel, that no one was being compelled to sing (Kikkeri Krishna Murthy; the Supreme Court declined to interfere in SLP (C) Diary No. 20297/2026). On that reasoning, an institutional duty to fly the flag as a condition of State support may be defensible. The safer course would be to make clear that no student, teacher or employee is personally required to participate.

Private organisations. Encouragement is unlikely to raise any difficulty; compulsion is harder to justify. In Bijoe Emmanuel v. State of Kerala, (1986) 3 SCC 615, the Supreme Court held that expelling students who stood respectfully but did not sing the National Anthem violated Articles 19(1)(a) and 25(1). It also held that departmental circulars without statutory backing could not restrict a fundamental right. The Court drew on, among other decisions, West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943), where compulsory flag salutes in schools were struck down. The principle appears to remain live. In September 2026, hearing T.M. Krishna v. Union of India, W.P. (C) No. 1183/2026, the Supreme Court said it expected Bijoe Emmanuel to govern the State's conduct and that conscientious non-participation would not attract penal consequences.

Read together, these decisions suggest that an executive order requiring private companies to fly the Kannada flag would face serious difficulty, since an executive instruction is not “law” for the purposes of Article 19(2) (Naveen Jindal; Bijoe Emmanuel). A statute would still need to fit within Article 19(2), which permits restrictions in the interests of sovereignty and integrity, security, public order, decency or morality and a few other grounds. Promoting regional identity is not among them. If the obligation were instead attached to business licences, it would likely be tested under Article 19(6) against the proportionality standard set out in Modern Dental College and Research Centre v. State of Madhya Pradesh, (2016) 7 SCC 353.

There is also a question of consistency. In a pending PIL before the Karnataka High Court, the State has defended its order limiting official recitals of Vande Mataram to two stanzas, arguing that rendition of the National Song is not mandatory. The Governor has asked the government to reconsider, citing Articles 162, 256 and 257(1) and the need for uniform national protocols. Whatever the merits of that dispute, the State's own position there, that participation in a symbolic act should not go beyond what the law requires, may sit uneasily with a requirement that private bodies display the State's flag.

What A Defensible Framework Might Contain

If the legislature proceeds, a framework is more likely to withstand scrutiny if it:

a) recognises the flag, by statute or government order, as a symbol of the State's linguistic and cultural identity, expressly subordinate to the National Flag and never flown in its place on national occasions;

b) requires a separate and lower mast, and follows the Flag Code's precedence rules whenever the two flags are displayed together;

c) limits compulsory display to the State's own offices and, as an institutional condition, to aided bodies, with an express saving for individual non-participation;

d) confines its approach to private organisations to voluntary encouragement, without licensing, penal or other adverse consequences; and

e) defines any offence protecting the flag's dignity narrowly, bearing in mind the vagueness concerns recently raised about extending penal protection to the National Song.

Karnataka was itself formed in 1956 through the linguistic reorganisation of States. Those who fear a State flag and those who welcome it can each find support in the constitutional text. Compulsion is where the text and the case law seem least likely to follow. The Tricolour's primacy is protected by statute and protocol, and a State flag may be able to coexist with it, so long as it remains a symbol the State offers rather than one it imposes.

Author is an Assistant Professor at School of Law CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Delhi NCR Campus. Views are personal.