Column | Demand For Devotion To Entire Vande Mataram Is A Particular Model Of Nationhood Asserting Itself: Pawan Khera

In October 2025, the Centre launched a year-long nationwide commemoration of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Vande Mataram’s 150th anniversary. Narendra Modi inaugurated it himself, the BJP organised singing events nationwide, and a state-backed content machine was switched on. Since then, we have been sold a simple story: in 1937, Jawaharlal Nehru and the  Congress, desperate to appease the Muslim League, “mutilated” Vande Mataram and thereby “sowed the seeds of Partition.”

The supposed mutilation was simply the Congress Working Committee’s (CWC’s) decision to use the first two stanzas at national gatherings — the two stanzas that celebrate India’s land and waters without Hindu religious imagery.

Now the 2026 version adds a constitutional twist: a “political compromise” of 1937, we are told, cannot override the Constituent Assembly’s recognition of Vande Mataram in 1950. New legal penalties for disrupting the song are presented as further proof that the old Congress decision must be corrected.

Ninety years are reduced to a morality tale: betrayal in 1937, correction in 2026.

The problem is that this neat story bears little resemblance to what actually happened.

The Hindu Nationhood Bogey

The mechanics of the rewrite are precise.

First, personalise the 1937 decision as Nehru’s alone. That is why the BJP repeatedly invokes him by name. The 1937 decision was not Nehru’s personal decision. Sardar Patel was a key figure in shaping and formally endorsing the CWC’s October 28, 1937 resolution, based on consultation with Rabindranath Tagore. The resolution explicitly recognised “the validity of the objections raised by Muslim friends to certain parts of the song.”

Why leave Sardar Patel out?

Because if Nehru alone is accused of “appeasement,” the story works. If Patel is included, the BJP must explain why the Congress man it has spent years appropriating supposedly endorsed the same compromise.

Second, they launder the charge through Gandhi, quoting his description of Vande Mataram as an anti-imperialist slogan as though that settles what the 1937 committee should have done with stanzas Gandhi did not write and was not asked to arbitrate.

But this only works if the conversation never wanders towards the BJP’s own ideological parentage.

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s second sarsanghchalak, and one of Hindu rashtra’s most consequential theorists, did not treat Vande Mataram as scripture. M.S. Golwalkar treated it with sarcasm bordering on contempt. Writing in his own name, he mocked the very idea of “motherland” as a slogan ‘coined by clever men to apply balm’ to a guilty conscience, invoked by a society that had, in his telling, once burned its widows alive without objection.

If anyone’s relationship with Vande Mataram requires historical reckoning, it is not the CWC members who consulted Tagore and settled the matter unanimously in 1937. It is the ideological parent of the party now demanding devotion to all six stanzas.

The Attack on Tagore’s Judgment

The 1937 decision was not imposed by Pandit Nehru. The Congress Working Committee met in Kolkata with Mahatma Gandhi, Pandit Nehru, Sardar Patel, Subhash Chandra Bose, Rajendra Prasad, Acharya Narendra Dev (who later served as the Vice Chancellor of Banaras Hindu University from 1951 to 1954), Maulana Azad, Sarojini Naidu and J.B. Kripalani among those involved.

The resolution was profoundly influenced by Rabindranath Tagore’s counsel.

Tagore had first sung the song into national consciousness at the 1896 Congress session. He understood Bengal’s devotional idiom. He also understood what the later stanzas’ invocation of Durga would mean to a nation he was trying to hold together rather than pull apart.

So when the BJP insists the 1937 decision “severed the soul” of the song, it is not really arguing with Pandit Nehru. It is overruling Tagore.

It is asking the country to believe that a poet, saint who spent his life thinking about what unites and divides a civilisation got it wrong, and that men nearly 90 years later who have only promoted divisive politics have finally corrected him.

That is why the BJP prefers to target the “Congress” rather than explaining the role of Tagore in the 1937 CWC resolution.

The Actual Logic of 1937

The most revealing thing about today’s Vande Mataram controversy is that the BJP is doing exactly what the Muslim League did in the 1930s: communalising the national song to remain politically relevant.

The controversy became politically useful after the Congress’ sweeping victory in the 1937 provincial elections, including in Muslim-majority areas, which threatened M.A. Jinnah’s political position. The Muslim League began communalising Vande Mataram and turning it into a political issue.

The chronology matters. Rajendra Prasad had already written to Sardar Patel about the controversy before the Muslim League’s Lucknow session. On October 15, 1937, Jinnah formally raised his objections there. The next day, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose wrote to Tagore about the matter. On October 17, Nehru discussed it with Tagore, describing the controversy as largely “manufactured” by communalists.

Tagore’s position was clear. Vande Mataram’s first two stanzas celebrate the motherland – its soil, waters, beauty and abundance – without requiring adherence to any particular faith. The later stanzas that invoke Durga and Lakshmi, placing them in a distinctly Hindu devotional register, could hurt Muslim sentiments. He also noted that the first two stanzas were already the established practice and were the portion most commonly sung.

The 1937 decision therefore did not “truncate” Vande Mataram. It formalised an existing practice.

The CWC therefore chose the portion that could function as a shared national symbol without requiring citizens of another faith to participate in a religious expression that was not their own.

That was not appeasement. It was the difficult work of building a common national identity in a country that was never going to be homogeneous.

The Constituent Assembly later affirmed the same approach. If the 1937 decision had truly “mutilated” Vande Mataram, the Assembly could have adopted all six stanzas after Independence and Partition. It did not. Rajendra Prasad’s declaration of January 24, 1950 did not overturn the earlier decision. In fact, Syama Prasad Mookerjee – whom the BJP today celebrates so enthusiastically – was himself a member of the Constituent Assembly. There is no record of him dissenting from the decision to exclude the remaining four stanzas.

And there is a deeper irony difficult to miss: while the BJP now treats any engagement with the Muslim League as betrayal, the Hindu Mahasabha – a predecessor of today’s Hindu nationalist politics – itself formed coalition governments with the Muslim League in the early 1940s.

Why has the BJP suddenly discovered the “missing” four stanzas after being in power since 2014?

Because this is not really about a song. It is about politics.

Just as the Muslim League once used Vande Mataram to strengthen its political position, the BJP is reviving the controversy today to attack Pandit Nehru, target the Congress and manufacture another culture war.

The BJP and the RSS are free to sing all six stanzas. Nobody has stopped them. What they are not entitled to do is rewrite the history of the freedom movement – turning Gurudev’s considered advice into Pandit Nehru’s cowardice and the plural, collective work of nation-building into “appeasement.”

What the Song Actually Says About India

India is not a nation-state in the European sense – one ethnicity, one language, one religion, one flag. It is a civilisational state containing within it what would, by the standards of any other continent, constitute dozens of separate nations.

What held it together was not the imposition of a single identity. It was the deliberate architecture of multiple simultaneous belongings – the founding judgment that you could be Hindu and Indian, Tamil and Indian, Muslim and Indian, Dalit and Indian, without one identity cancelling the other.

That is what Babasaheb built into the Constitution, what Pandit Nehru built into institutions, and what Sardar Patel reinforced by negotiating hundreds of princely states into a union rather than demanding they dissolve into a uniform centre.

India’s survival is not despite its pluralism. It is because of it.

The 1937 decision on Vande Mataram belongs to this same reasoning. The Congress chose the first two stanzas because it understood what it was building. For a freedom movement that needed every Indian regardless of religion, making Hindu devotional imagery a compulsory condition of national belonging was a demand it would not make.

The rival theory has a name: Hindu rashtra.

The demand for devotion to all six stanzas is not merely a musicological preference. It is a particular model of nationhood asserting itself – one that sees plurality as a wound requiring correction. The real target, as such, is not a song but the idea that pluralism is a matter of principle rather than weakness.

Deflection Amidst Radical Pushback

Why this particular controversy involving the Congress now? The political context is impossible to ignore. For nearly 90 years, Vande Mantaram was not a national wound. Until the BJP needed one.

Citizens can be culturally Hindu, deeply nationalistic and proud of India – and still ask: Why should religious pride excuse corruption? Why should temple politics replace jobs? Why should nationalism substitute for secure livelihoods? Why should a government invoke Hindu civilization while creating extraordinary wealth for a handful of billionaires?

India’s youth – Hindu and non-Hindu alike – are increasingly asking these questions. They have seen the WhatsApp politics, the manufactured outrage and the endless demand to prove how much they love India. And that is precisely what is beginning to threaten the BJP: people are separating their love for the country from their loyalty to the government. They are asking material questions about jobs, education, corruption, inequality and who really benefits from economic policy.

So when those questions become uncomfortable, the politics changes the subject –  manufacturing controversies where none exist and turning settled history into another loyalty test. But unfortunately for the BJP, no amount of stagecraft around a national song can erase those questions.

Pawan Khera is a Rajya Sabha member and Chairperson, Media & Publicity Dept, AICC