Twelve people have been arrested at an international film festival in south India for refusing to comply with a supreme court order to stand for the national anthem at cinemas.

Protests were held on Tuesday at venues involved in the International Film Festival of Kerala over the arrests, the second police incident in recent days involving the new national anthem requirements.

The group were detained after festival organisers complained to police that some moviegoers had refused to stand for the anthem before a film screening on Monday, an investigator with the Kerala police, Anil Kumar, told the Guardian.

They were released on bail but Kerala police have started an investigation into whether they breached the Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act of 1971. Intentionally breaching the act is punishable by a fine and up to three years in prison.

India’s supreme court announced last month that cinemas across the country had to start film screenings by playing the anthem, during which time doors should be locked and moviegoers should stand.

The court said the order was needed so that citizens would “feel that they live in a nation”, and that too much disrespect of national symbols had been indulged in the name of “individually perceived notions of freedom”.

The decision played into concerns held by some Indians that the country’s traditionally pluralist character was being undermined by a coarser nationalism that leaves less room for minority rights or dissent.

About 100 people took part in protests outside cinema venues in Kerala on Tuesday, holding signs that read: “Playing the national anthem in theatre is like selling it for free in a supermarket. Please don’t degrade my national anthem.”

A film society said compliance with the order for a big film festival is ‘impractical’. Photograph: Indranil Mukherjee/AFP/Getty Images

One of the demonstrators, film-maker Sanal Kumar Sasidharan, said the supreme court’s order was “a very extreme step” and that cinemas were not “the proper place to play the national anthem”.

He said that at least one of those arrested the previous day had taken part in Tuesday’s protests.

A film society based in Kerala had petitioned the supreme court on Friday to exempt the film festival from the new national anthem regulations.

The Kodungallur Film Society had argued that the 490 film screenings scheduled for the seven-day festival, and the 13,000 people it was expected to draw, made compliance with the order impractical.

The court rejected their plea but amended its earlier order to clarify that disabled people did not need to stand, only to “show such conduct which is commensurate with respect for the national anthem”. The doors of cinemas should be closed during the rendition, but not bolted shut, it added.

A brawl broke out on Sunday in a cinema in Chennai, in neighbouring Tamil Nadu state, after one group of moviegoers objected to another taking selfies and talking while the anthem was played.

Six people from the group who remained seated were charged for breaching the new anthem law, Chennai police said.

The anthem, Jana Gana Mana, was first ordered to be played in Indian cinemas in the early 1960s after India’s war with China, but enforcement was lacklustre, and the practice was eventually phased out in all but two states.



Additional reporting by Sandhya Ravishankar