Political Notes of the National Song

IN JANUARY, proto­cols changed around ‘Vande Mataram’, the national song. The home ministry directed that all six stanzas would now have to be sung instead of just the first two. When a Supreme Court order interpreted them as an advisory, the gov­ernment amended the law governing national symbols and passed it in Parliament. It came into effect on August 11 and four days later, on Independence Day, for the first time ever, the entire song was sung from the Red Fort. But what also got attention was an occur­rence at a flag hoisting function in the Congress headquarters the same day.

Its President Mallikar­jun Kharge was standing at attention during the song when Sonia Gandhi nearby was seen gesturing some­thing in a video clip. Oppo­nents online alleged it was her calling for the stopping of the song after the second stanza. Later, clarification came from the party that she was merely asking for a chair for the aged Kharge to sit on. Congress soon after stated that they would henceforth only sing the first two stanzas. If Sonia Gandhi had not asked for it at that event, why was the party now insistent? It was as if because the contro­versy happened, it had now decided to take a position.

The episode is just the latest in the many times that the ‘Vande Mataram’ has thrust itself into the centre of national politics, and it started even before India became independent. ‘Vande Mataram’ has two origins. The first two stan­zas were written as a poem by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay in 1875. Seven years later, he pub­lished a novel Anandamath, set around a rebellion of sanyasis against a Muslim ruler, in which a character sings the ‘Vande Mataram’, but with more stanzas added and one of them compares love for country to worship of deities like Durga, Lakshmi and Saraswati, imbuing the nation with their qualities. India wasn’t an indepen­dent country then, so the Mataram (mother) the song was alluding to is considered to be Bengal.

It however soon became a rallying cry for the national freedom move­ment that was taking off. Chattopadhyay himself, it has been argued, actu­ally based Anandamath as a book of resistance against the British but couldn’t do it openly—he was afraid of censorship or, as someone working in a government job then, of punitive action. Others claim it is a book that does not try to hide its commu­nalism against Muslims. What is clear is that as the song gained status, it became and remained a fault line between Hindus and Muslims during the independence movement because of the imagery of the goddesses. India was a society in a fractious moment. Both Hindus and Muslims were mobilising politically, and riots were commonplace. The British often banned or restricted its rendition in some of the places it governed because of its potential to create unrest between the two religions.

The political complex­ity around it can be seen in how Rabindranath Tagore, who was instrumental in popularising ‘Vande Mataram’ and sang it at the 1896 Congress session in Calcutta, is also held responsible for the 1937 Congress resolution that limited it to two stanzas. In a letter to Jawaharlal Nehru, he wrote: “I freely concede that the whole of Bankim’s ‘Bande Mataram’ poem read together with its context is liable to be interpreted in ways that might wound Moslem sus­ceptibilities, but a national song though derived from it which has spontaneously come to consist only of the first two stanzas of the original poem, need not remind us every time of the whole of it, much less of the story with which it was accidentally associ­ated.” When India became independent and ‘Vande Mataram’ was adopted as the national song, it was only the first two stanzas that were listed and needed to be sung at government functions.

In 1971, the Congress government passed the Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act. It made it a crime to insult the flag, the Constitution and the national anthem and specified what those insults might be. Missing in the list was the ‘Vande Mataram’ despite it being the national song. In Janu­ary this year, the govern­ment changed the protocol by making ‘Vande Mata­ram’ to be sung before the national anthem. It made the full version of its sing­ing incumbent at official functions. This was timed to last year being the 150th anniversary commemora­tion of the ‘Vande Mata­ram’. It was an opportune moment for the govern­ment to reinforce cultural nationalism, where Hindu symbols were not elements to be wary about or care­fully negotiated into public life but proudly owned.

Congress has argued for not changing a compro­mise that kept everyone’s sensitivities in mind in a country as diverse as India. Two days after the Sonia Gandhi incident, on August 17, at an event of the party in Goa, Kharge and local functionaries deliberately sang only two stanzas of the ‘Vande Mataram’. Two days after that, on August 19, the Con­gress Working Committee stated that the party would only sing the two stanzas at all its functions as was first decided in 1937. Kharge says they were only emu­lating what leaders like Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi and Atal Bihari Vajpayee had done. “If this is a crime, then put cases against Nehru and Gandhi,” he told the media.

However, while singing the entire song is necessary in government functions, it is hard to see how it can be considered an insult to just sing two stanzas at a political party’s event. The law mentions preventing the singing or creating disturbances as instances of crimes, not the pruning of the song. While cases might be filed, any ground for being sent to jail is bleak. ‘Vande Mataram’ has however now served to become an issue around which the two sides can reassert their ideologies. For BJP, the presentation of its anti-appeasement and nationalist credentials, and for Congress, that it is the party for secular­ism in India.