New Delhi, Feb. 22: Let Sindh stay in the national anthem ? dump the petition.

This will be the crux of the submission the government will make when the Supreme Court takes up the plea that has sought its intervention to replace ?Sindh? with ?Kashmir? in the anthem.

The petitioner, Sanjeev Bhatnagar, had moved the apex court to get ?Sindh? removed from Rabindra Nath Tagore?s Jana Gana Mana on the ground that after Partition, Sindh was no longer a part of India. In January, the court directed the government to respond to the plea.

Officials said the home ministry, which had earlier turned down Bhatnagar?s suggestion, is in no mood to revise its opinion.

The plea kicked up a storm among Sindhis. Former deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani, who was born and raised in Sindh, wrote to the Prime Minister about its divisive potential. Advani invoked lines from Jawaharlal Nehru?s Discovery of India to underline his point. ?The word Hindu is clearly derived from Sindhu, the old as well as the present Indian name for the Indus,? he wrote quoting Nehru. ?From this Sindhu came the words Hindu and Hindustan as well as Indus and India.? Some prominent Sindhis even got together to form what lawyer Ram Jethmalani called a Sindhi Action Committee to mobilise public opinion.

Home ministry officials said there is ?no reason for the government to amend the anthem? as ?Sindh? refers to the rich culture of the Sindhis, not merely the physical province. If the government accepts Bhatnagar?s argument, there would be no end to the changes that could be made to the poem, says an official. ?How far should one go,? he added, wondering whether the anthem should be amended to include the north-eastern states, too.