Congress has reopened an 89-year-old compromise. After Parliament cleared amendments to the Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act, 1971 — giving Vande Mataram the same legal standing as the national anthem, Jana Gana Mana — the party confirmed it would continue singing only the song’s first two stanzas.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) called this “anti-national”. Congress called the BJP “fraudulent and fake nationalists”.
Both the sides are, in effect, arguing over a decision the Congress Working Committee (CWC) took on October 28, 1937.
The current exchange
Congress MP Jairam Ramesh set off the latest round by posting an excerpt from historian Sabyasachi Bhattacharya’s book, Vande Mataram – The Biography of a Song, on X. The excerpt records that the CWC — comprising Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Subhas Chandra Bose, Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad, Govind Vallabh Pant and Acharya Narendra Dev — “readily accepted” the idea of adopting only the opening two stanzas at its meeting on October 28, 1937, an idea Ramesh says came from Tagore himself.
“It was the Gurudev himself — with his own special relationship to Vande Mataram — who suggested that the first two stanzas of the song be adopted,” Ramesh wrote, arguing that the BJP was effectively accusing Tagore of harbouring a divisive ideology.
{{/usCountry}}“It was the Gurudev himself — with his own special relationship to Vande Mataram — who suggested that the first two stanzas of the song be adopted,” Ramesh wrote, arguing that the BJP was effectively accusing Tagore of harbouring a divisive ideology.
{{/usCountry}}Union home minister Amit Shah called the 1937 resolution an act “for the sake of appeasement”.
“It was the Congress itself that fragmented Vande Mataram into two parts,” he said.
Congress leader KC Venugopal pushed back, saying: “Vande Mataram and the national anthem are important things for the Congress party but it is political for the BJP. That is the difference between them and us.”
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The song
Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay wrote Vande Mataram — “mother, I bow to thee” — in Sanskritised Bengali in 1875, later folding it into his novel Anandamath. The novel was set during the Sanyasi Rebellion, an armed uprising against East India Company rule in late 18th-century Bengal. Tagore set the verses to music.
The song entered the national movement during the Swadeshi years of 1905–08. In 1907, Madam Bhikaji Cama raised the Tricolour for the first time outside India, in Germany’s Stuttgart, with “Vande Mataram” inscribed on it.
After the second stanza
The first two stanzas are pastoral and maternal. They describe a motherland rich in water, fruit and harvests, cooled by pleasant winds, and speaking softly like a mother under moonlit skies.
From the third stanza, the register shifts. The imagery turns martial and draws directly on Hindu goddess iconography — the motherland is named as Durga, “who holds the sword in her hand”, and likened to Lakshmi, goddess of wealth, and Saraswati, goddess of knowledge. One stanza fuses all three goddesses’ attributes — strength, wealth, wisdom — into a single image of the nation as mother.
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The 1937 debate
The later verses troubled some leaders well before the Congress took a formal position. Subhas Chandra Bose, who supported the song, and Nehru both wrote to Tagore seeking his view.
Separately, Nehru told Bose the song risked offending Muslim sentiment and admitted the language was so dense that even he needed a dictionary to follow it. “There is no doubt that the present outcry against Bande Mataram is to a large extent a manufactured one by the communalists,” Nehru wrote, according to nehruarchive.in.
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“At the same time there does seem some substance in it... Whatever we do cannot be to pander to communalists’ feelings but to meet real grievances where they exist.”
He said he would take the matter up with Tagore directly.
Tagore's reply, according to Bhattacharya’s book, explains why he singled out the opening stanzas. “The spirit of tenderness and devotion expressed in its first portion, the emphasis it gave to beautiful and beneficent aspects of our motherland made a special appeal, so much so that I found no difficulty in dissociating it from the rest of the poem,” he wrote.
He went on, “I freely concede that the whole of Bankim’s ‘Vande Mataram' poem, read together with its context, is liable to be interpreted in ways that might wound Moslem susceptibilities,”. But argued that the song had “spontaneously come to consist only of the first two stanzas”, and need not carry the weight of the whole original.
Mahatma Gandhi took a similar line. Writing in Harijan on July 1, 1939, he said he had never regarded Vande Mataram as a “Hindu song”, but given the “evil days” of rising communal tension, he was unwilling to risk a quarrel over it at any mixed gathering, according to Gandhi Research Foundation.
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Muslim League leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah went further, saying Muslims across the country rejected Vande Mataram outright as a binding national anthem, according to a Frontline report that cited The New Times of Lahore of March 1, 1998.
Gandhi later said that if anyone at a mixed gathering objected even to the trimmed, Congress-approved version, the singing should stop altogether.
What the resolution said
The CWC’s October 1937 resolution, as recorded by Bhattacharya, held that the first two stanzas were a “living and inseparable part of our national movement” that commanded “affection and respect”, with nothing in them “to which anyone can take exception”. The remaining stanzas, it said, were “little known and hardly ever sung” and contained “allusions and a religious ideology which may not be in keeping with the ideology of other religious groups in India”.
That nearly nine-decade-old line, drawn on Tagore’s counsel, is what Congress and the BJP are now fighting over again.