Why Stop at Vande Mataram? Why Not Jana Gana Mana?

• The Union government has officially restored all six stanzas of Vande Mataram.

• But the national anthem has only the first stanza of Rabindranath Tagore’s song, while the four stanzas that follow have almost disappeared from civic memory.

• The point is not to diminish Vande Mataram, but to recognise what the fuller Tagore composition adds to India’s national imagination.

On August 16, speaking in Chittorgarh, Union Home Minister Amit Shah asked, “How can anyone even dream of leaving the song of Vande Mataram incomplete?” He was referring to the Independence Day programme at the Congress headquarters, where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) alleged that Sonia Gandhi had asked for the six-stanza rendition to be stopped midway, while the Congress maintained that she was merely asking for a chair for Mallikarjun Kharge. He described the alleged interruption as a “sin” that the country would not forgive.

What makes his charge interesting, however, is not merely the partisan dispute but the larger principle contained within it. If a patriotic composition is diminished when later generations remember only a fragment of it, why should that concern apply to Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay alone? Why should the recovery of forgotten verses stop with Vande Mataram? Rabindranath Tagore’s Bharoto Bhagyo Bidhata, from which Jana Gana Mana is drawn, has five stanzas, although most Indians encounter only the first.

The Union government has officially restored the complete Vande Mataram this year. In an order, dated January 28, the Union Home Ministry recognised all six stanzas as the official version, which has a duration of about three minutes and 10 seconds, prescribed its use at specified official occasions and in schools, and placed Vande Mataram before Jana Gana Mana whenever both are performed together. Akashvani adopted the six-stanza version in March, and Parliament has since amended the Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act, 1971, to extend protection against intentional disruption to the national song. On August 15, Prime Minister Narendra Modi observed from the Red Fort that Vande Mataram was resonating there for the first time since Independence.

Beside One Another, Not Against Each Other

The Union government has, therefore, made completeness a question of national memory, and that principle deserves consistent application. A republic

ought to know the texts that nourished its nationalism in their fuller form, rather than only through the fragments that later entered public ritual. The government’s own recent legislative history supplies the licence to extend that principle beyond Vande Mataram. The National Honour amendment relied on Rajendra Prasad’s declaration to the Constituent Assembly on January 24, 1950, that Vande Mataram, because of its historic role in the freedom struggle, should be honoured equally with Jana Gana Mana. Prasad’s formulation placed the two compositions beside one another, not against each other. If that settlement is now invoked to restore Bankim’s composition to fuller public memory, it also invites a question about what has been forgotten of Tagore. Yet, the Union government’s own instructions continue to describe the national anthem as the first stanza of Tagore’s song, while the four stanzas that follow have almost disappeared from civic memory.

The forgotten second stanza matters because it expands the nation from geography into social plurality. The first stanza travels across Punjab, Sindh, Gujarat, Maratha, Dravida, Utkala and Bengal, past the Vindhyas and Himalayas, the Yamuna and the Ganga. The second invokes Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains, Parsis, Muslims and Christians. In Tagore’s English rendering, East and West join hands, a “garland of love” is woven, and the people enter the “harmony of one life”. India remembers Tagore’s geography every time the anthem is sung; public memory has been less attentive to his sociology.

Liberty, Equality and Fraternity

That second stanza also speaks directly to fraternity, one of the Preamble’s foundational commitments. Justice, liberty and equality occupy a prominent

place in constitutional argument, but fraternity is more often recited than examined. B. R. Ambedkar, in his final speech to the Constituent Assembly on November 25, 1949, insisted that liberty, equality and fraternity formed an inseparable union. Without fraternity, he warned, liberty and equality would require “a constable to enforce them”.

Tagore had given poetic expression to a related problem decades before the Constitution gave fraternity its juridical place. How can a country divided by religion, language, region and history imagine itself as one people without requiring its citizens to become alike? In the second stanza, his answer was not to erase difference but to name it and place Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, Parsi, Muslim and Christian within a common national imagination. Long before fraternity entered the constitutional text, Tagore had supplied one of its most evocative poetic expressions.

The Union government should, therefore, follow its own argument about historical recovery to its logical conclusion. The point is not to diminish Vande Mataram, but to recognise what the fuller Tagore composition adds to India’s national imagination.

Vande Mataram recalls the emotional force with which the motherland entered the freedom struggle. Tagore’s fuller composition asks another enduring question: who inhabits that motherland, and on what terms do they belong to one another?

The argument about incompleteness is, therefore, worth retaining, but it cannot be applied selectively. If the six stanzas of Vande Mataram deserve recovery because a part of India’s nationalist inheritance was forgotten, Tagore’s neglected stanzas also deserve recovery because they preserve a part of India’s constitutional inheritance too. At a time when the boundaries of belonging are contested, the stanza that gathers India’s religions into a common “garland of love” may be precisely the one the republic most needs to hear. So, why stop with Vande Mataram?

 Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the organisation.