Vande Mataram does not deserve political slugfest
The song united Indians in the freedom struggle. Today, however, its legacy risks becoming another fault line in a deeply divided political discourse
On August 13, all six stanzas of Vande Mataram were sung inside the Lok Sabha for the first time in parliamentary history, as the Monsoon Session drew to a close. Two days later, from the ramparts of Red Fort, the full song was heard for the first time at an Independence Day ceremony - the 80th since 1947. The timing was crucial: 2025-26 marks 150 years since Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay composed the song, later woven into his novel Anandamath, and it comes days after a new law made insulting or disrupting Vande Mataram a criminal offence, on par with the National Anthem.
Few songs carry this kind of weight. It was a rallying cry from Bengal’s 1905 partition through the Quit India movement, sung by revolutionaries who faced lathis and prison for it. Yet its journey was never simple. In 1937, the Congress Working Committee — Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Subhas Bose and Maulana Azad among them — resolved that only the first two stanzas, evoking the motherland’s rivers and orchards, would be sung at national gatherings. The later verses invoke the goddess Durga; Tagore, consulted on the matter, advised that the opening stanzas could stand alone as a national song without carrying that religious charge into a plural nation. It was accommodation, not erasure — a considered decision to hold a diverse freedom movement together.
That history is exactly what is being contested now. Inaugurating the anniversary commemorations in November, Prime Minister Modi said the 1937 trimming had “sowed the seeds of Partition” — a charge Congress calls a distortion that insults both the Working Committee and Tagore himself. The row has since curdled: a Kerala Congress MP’s intemperate vow never to sing the full version; a disputed video from a Congress Independence Day event that the BJP seized on as proof Sonia Gandhi and Mallikarjun Kharge had tried to cut the song short — something Congress disputes; a public demand from Amit Shah for an apology; police complaints in Delhi and Karnataka.
Even as MPs from the NCP, Shiv Sena and YSRCP urged that the song not be reduced to a political football, that is precisely what it has become. Would the country not be better served letting this song simply be sung and revered, without a running scorecard? A hymn that moved millions across faiths during the freedom struggle needs no statute to secure its place in the national imagination — it earned that, unaided, over 150 years.
Legislating reverence, and mining history for a partisan point, both cheapen a symbol that once asked only for love of country, nothing more. The flag, the anthem, this song - none of them belong in any single party’s custody. The most patriotic thing today’s politicians could do is stop competing over who loves Vande Mataram more, and simply let it keep doing what it has always done best: unite, rather than divide, without anyone needing to be told to sing it.
