Lucknow, Oct. 19: One is a politician, the other is a cricketer. One is 91, the other is 38. So what is common to Choudhary Harmohan Singh and Sachin Tendulkar?

A cake. A “Tricolour” cake to be more exact.

A 5kg cake cut on the veteran Samajwadi Party leader’s birthday yesterday has left a bad taste in the mouth after police registered an FIR against unknown persons on the ground that the cake resembled the national flag.

Police sources here said a case was filed last night under the Prevention of Insults to the National Honour Act, 1971, after the birthday bash at Kanpur.

Under the act, anyone who “burns, mutilates, defaces, disfigures, destroys or tramples upon or otherwise shows disrespect to the national flag” can be jailed for up to three years or fined.

Singh, a close aide of Samajwadi chief Mulayam Singh Yadav, now fears the police will file a case against him.

A few years ago, Tendulkar too had landed in a spot of bother after being accused of cutting a cake that resembled the Tricolour. That was in Jamaica. The master batsman later clarified that he had never thought of insulting the national flag.

If Tendulkar was criticised for running his knife through the “Tricolour”, a case was filed against Sania Mirza for pointing her feet at the national flag.

The tennis star was clicked with her feet up on a table that happened to be facing an Indian flag during the 2008 Hopman Cup in Australia.

Senior Samajwadi leaders said the colour of the cake might have had some similarities with the national flag but it was not “intentional”.

“It is funny to imagine that a 91-year-old veteran leader would insult the national flag,” said former minister and Mulayam’s brother Shivpal Singh Yadav who attended the bash.

Inspector H.R. Verma, of Kanpur city police station, said video footage and photographs submitted by local newspapers and channels showed “the cake was designed on the colours of the national flag with a ‘chakra’ in its centre”.

“We have been instructed by the district administration to conduct a probe and take action on completion of the inquiry,” Verma added.

Allahabad High Court advocate Ajit Menon said dozens of cases were filed every year for alleged disrespect to the flag because of the definition of the term “Indian National Flag” under the act.

The flag, according to the act, means “any picture, painting, drawing or photograph, or other visible representation of the Indian National Flag, or of any part or parts thereof, made of any substance or represented on any substance”.

But the act says a complainant has to prove that the accused had committed “gross affront or indignity” to the flag.

In August this year, a high court judge in Andhra Pradesh had acquitted Congress chief Sonia Gandhi of the charge of insulting the national flag in 2007 by getting her party leaders’ faces embossed on it. The judge said the “use of the Tricolour cannot be a dishonour to the national flag”.

Menon said many complainants filed cases just to harass respectable citizens.

Kanpur social worker Navneet Sharma agreed, saying it smacked of “cosmetic” nationalism. “Slapping charges of insulting the national flag against respectable citizens is a kind of blackmail that some individuals indulge in,” he said.