I Used To Boycott International Day of Yoga. Here's What Changed

Someone asked me recently what I think about International Day of Yoga. It's taken me a while to answer honestly, because it matters to me more than most things I write here. So, plainly: for years, I boycotted it. This is the long version of why, and why I changed my mind.

Why I sat it out

For the last few years, a number of yoga practitioners, teachers and brands have started boycotted International Day of Yoga, and I was one of them.

To understand why, it helps to start with the date. 21st June is not random: it's the summer solstice (the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere), a day that carries meaning in cultures all over the world. International Day of Yoga was proposed by India's government in 2014, and deliberately set here, on the solstice.

What a beautiful reason to celebrate, right?

But...Yoga is also one of India's most powerful exports, and a beautiful, universal-sounding reason is exactly the kind of thing that makes a state initiative feel like it belongs to everyone. The day was introduced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and since 2014 his government has been widely criticised for stripping marginalised groups and minority religions of their freedoms. When a peaceful, globally loved practice gets attached to a government with that record, the practice starts doing reputational work. A calm, tolerant image abroad helps soften how the harder politics gets read at home.

There's a word for this. Sheena Sood, who is a sociologist, writer and yoga teacher, calls it Om-washing, built from "greenwashing." Where greenwashing uses an environmental image to cover environmental harm, Om-washing borrows yoga's gentle, non-violent face as public relations: dressing up a politics that is anything but calm or tolerant.

I grew up in a Muslim household, with roots in India. So watching yoga and its international day used to promote a nationalist, exclusionary idea of who belongs made me deeply uneasy. I'm not the biggest on politics, but I care about social justice and inclusion, and those are core values of yoga itself, and of Ladina. So I questioned myself honestly: how can I celebrate this day, knowing its origin and its consequences?

What gets lost in the boycott

Here's what eventually unsettled my position.

My dad used to practise yoga on stage on this day, back in Madagascar. He loved it so much that he wanted to share his passion with other people. He was blissfully unaware that International Day of Yoga had political origins at all. He was just a man who loved a practice and wanted to give it away to others.

That image stayed with me, because it's the truth the politics obscures. Yoga is a life-changing wellbeing and spiritual practice; it's added real meaning and ease to my life, and to my dad's, and to millions of people's who have never thought about Narendra Modi for a second. And it is genuinely ancient and genuinely shared: its roots run across India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt and beyond, shaped by Sufism, Buddhism and Jainism as well as Hinduism. It is older, wider and more plural than any single government's version of it. No party owns it. The idea that it belongs to one nationalist story is itself the distortion.

My silence never cost the government anything: it has never once noticed whether I celebrated. What the boycott actually cost was the practice, and the people who might come to it for the first time on a day like today and feel something shift. Sitting it out didn't deny anything to the people misusing yoga. It just handed it to them.

And this is where Sheena Sood, who named the problem, actually lands too. Her argument was never abandon yoga. It was reclaim it: refuse to let the people misusing something be the ones who get to decide what it means.

Why I changed my mind

So recently, I changed my position. I now think about International Day of Yoga a bit like Black Friday. I don't support it, but I understand the intention of people who choose to mark it in a more purposeful way.

Because intention matters. If International Day of Yoga means more people learn about yoga, breathe better, move better, find more compassion, maybe have a genuinely life-changing experience - then why not mark it by running intentional, purposeful classes and events that also teach people the real, complicated origin story of the day? Celebration and honesty aren't opposites. You can do both in the same breath.

There's even a version of this I'd love to see someone build. In 2021, Holly Tucker- founder of Not On The High Street-launched Colour Friday, a campaign to support independent businesses as an alternative to Black Friday. Maybe it's time for a variation (pun fully intended) of International Day of Yoga: a day that keeps the practice and drops the soft power.

Where I've landed

I won't pretend the day is innocent. The Om-washing critique is real, and I don't take back a word of it. And I won't let the people instrumentalising this practice decide whether I'm allowed to celebrate where it comes from.

I hold both.

I'd also rather we talked about this openly than tiptoed around it. You don't have to pick a side to think clearly about something, and the yoga world is poorer when honest, differing perspectives get flattened into one acceptable opinion. We're all different. That's the point.

If you're practising today, for the first time or the thousandth, that's yours. Knowing the full story of the day doesn't take the practice away from you. If anything, it's the thing that lets you keep it.

Sources: Sheena Sood, "'Om-washing': Why Modi's yoga day pose is deceptive" (Al Jazeera, 2023), and her research "Omwashing Yoga: Weaponized Spirituality in India, Israel, and the US." International Day of Yoga was adopted by UN General Assembly Resolution 69/131 in 2014.