Vande Mataram Row: The Tagore Angle And 1937 Resolution Behind Congress’ Two-Stanza Rendition

A dispute over how many stanzas of Vande Mataram to sing has turned into one of the sharpest Congress-BJP clashes of the year. After Congress leaders sang only the first two stanzas of the national song at party events around Independence Day, the BJP accused the opposition of disrespecting it. Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge has stood his ground, arguing that the shorter rendition follows a nearly 90-year-old tradition set by the freedom movement's own leaders.

The clash lands at a charged moment: Parliament has passed a law criminalising insults to the National Song, and the government is midway through a year-long commemoration of Vande Mataram's 150th anniversary. But the argument itself is far from new, it revives a debate that goes back to a Congress Working Committee resolution passed in 1937.

What exactly is the current Vande Mataram row?

The immediate trigger was Congress functionaries singing only the first two stanzas of Vande Mataram at the party's Independence Day programme at its Delhi headquarters and at other party events, which the BJP seized on as evidence of continued discomfort with the full song.In Kerala, the state's Congress-led government reportedly left Vande Mataram out of its official Independence Day programme altogether, despite a Union government direction that the complete six-stanza version be rendered.

The row follows an earlier flashpoint in which the BJP accused Sonia Gandhi of objecting to the song, a claim Congress denied, and comes just over a week after President Droupadi Murmu gave assent, on August 11, 2026, to the Prevention of Insults to National Honour (Amendment) Act, which extends the same statutory protection enjoyed by the National Anthem to the National Song.

Why does Congress sing only the first two stanzas?

Kharge has defended the practice as continuing a tradition nearly 90 years old, telling ANI that he sang the same version of Vande Mataram that Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru did. He argued that if this were treated as an offence, cases would have to be filed against Gandhi, Nehru and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel too.

Kharge has also pointed out that the Congress resolution determining how the song should be publicly rendered was passed decades before any of today's leaders were even born, and argued that a settled national practice should not change simply because a different party is now in power.

What did the 1937 Congress resolution actually say?

Congress traces its position to a 1937 Congress Working Committee resolution that limited the song's public rendition to its first two stanzas, a decision the party says was backed by freedom movement leaders including Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore.

As historian Sabyasachi Bhattacharya has explained, the first two stanzas were originally composed as a hymn to the motherland, while the fuller poem was written in the context of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay's novel Anandamath and its later verses introduced explicitly Hindu religious imagery, including references associated with deity worship, the specific content the 1937 resolution sought to leave out of public, cross-community renditions.

The Tagore angle

Congress's defence of the two-stanza version explicitly invokes Tagore's backing, and Tagore's connection to the song runs deeper than that one endorsement — he set Vande Mataram to music in 1896 and sang it himself at a Congress session, helping turn it into a rallying cry of the freedom movement in the first place.

Congress spokesperson Supriya Shrinate has framed the ongoing dispute as a contest between what she called Tagore's own vision for the song and a different version she said is now being promoted, underscoring that the 1937 choice to render only two stanzas was presented, at the time, as staying true to Tagore's own reading of the poem rather than diminishing it.

How did Vande Mataram become a symbol of Indian nationalism?

The British government considered the words "Bande Mataram" seditious and tried to suppress them through violence and intimidation. At the Bengal Provincial Conference in Barisal in April 1906, police responded to delegates wearing Bande Mataram badges with a brutal lathi charge, tearing the badges off and beating some so severely that they collapsed. Over the following decades, the cry became bound up with sacrifice and resistance across the country, particularly in Bengal, and evolved into one of the defining slogans of the movement against British rule — the same legacy both the Congress and the BJP now invoke to argue that the other side is misusing or diminishing it.

What is the BJP objecting to?

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has repeatedly criticised the 1937 decision, arguing during a special parliamentary discussion marking the song's 150th anniversary that Congress had fragmented the poem under pressure from the Muslim League.

In the Rajya Sabha in December 2025, Home Minister Amit Shah went further, linking the shortened rendition to the politics that led to Partition and accusing Nehru of dividing the poem. BJP national spokesperson C.R. Kesavan and others have revived this line in the current row, while Anurag Thakur has called the party's continued discomfort with the full version a matter of "the nation's honour" rather than a question of protocol.

What does this dispute really represent?

Stripped of its immediate political charge, the row is a rerun of the same argument the Congress tried to settle in 1937: whether a song written as a hymn to the motherland, but carrying explicit religious imagery in its later verses, can serve as a unifying national symbol for a religiously diverse country, or whether trimming it for that purpose amounts to diluting its meaning.

With a new law now criminalising insults to the song and a year-long commemoration keeping it in the news, the argument over two stanzas versus six has become, once again, a proxy battle over who gets to define patriotism and own the legacy of India's freedom struggle.