Song Politics

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s address to a special sitting of the Lok Sabha to mark 150 years of Vande Mataram predictably turned into an exercise in political combat with the Opposition, primarily the Congress. Few cultural artefacts in India carry as heavy a historical charge as Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s hymn. To invoke it is to summon the romance of the freedom struggle, the fury of partition politics and the enduring anxieties of national identity in a single breath.

In Modi’s opening flourish, he remarked that when Vande Mataram turned 50, India was in colonial bondage; at 100, it was under Emergency. Now, as the song completes 150 years, the nation has a chance to “restore its glory.” This neat chronology was meant to burnish the Bharatiya Janata Party’s self-image as the custodian of national revival.

The Prime Minister then recalled Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s opposition to Vande Mataram in 1937, Jawaharlal Nehru’s caution that the song might “irritate Muslims,” and the Congress Working Committee’s decision that year to limit its official use. In Modi’s telling, this was not just an attempt at communal accommodation but an original sin of appeasement - the first “fragmentation” of the national song that eventually led by inexorable logic to the Partition of India.

The controversy over Vande Mataram arose because its imagery, drawn from Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s 19^th century novel Anandamath, blended patriotism with religious symbolism that some Muslims found exclusionary. Gandhi himself admired the song’s emotional force but also worried about coercion in matters of conscience. India’s freedom movement was rarely ideologically tidy; it was a series of uneasy bargains stitched together under pressure.

Modi’s speech was also less about historiography than about present politics. By invoking Bengal - Bankim’s home and a State inching towards a key electoral contest - he signalled a renewed cultural courtship of the eastern frontier, where his party still struggles for dominance. Reviving Vande Mataram is also a bid to resonate with a Bengali electorate that takes fierce pride in its literary inheritance.

The retort by the Opposition and many others that Parliament should spend more time to debate pollution and the ongoing IndiGo crisis has struck a nerve. Fewer than 10 percent of Indians can recite the song in full, even as politicians wrap themselves in its symbolism. Against a ledger of urgencies like the air choking Delhi, a day-long debate on a national hymn can look like indulgence.

Still, it would be wrong to dismiss the moment entirely as spectacle. Vande Mataram did animate India’s revolutionaries; men did indeed walk to the gallows with its refrain on their lips. Its revival speaks to a deeper desire to reconnect nationalism with sacrifice rather than entitlement. The real discomfort is not that Vande Mataram is being invoked, but that it is being invoked without equivocation.

For the first time in decades, the anthem of revolt is no longer being murmured as heritage, but asserted as inheritance.