On August 2026 22, the Bharatiya Janata Party passed a resolution criticising the Congress Working Committee’s decision to reaffirm its 1937 resolution and restrict the singing of Vande Mataram to its first two stanzas at Congress events. The television debates have raged on since, and the BJP is looking to use the controversy against any criticism directed at its handling of the country’s more pressing problems, from crumbling infrastructure in schools and hospitals to the lack of jobs and secure employment for skilled and unskilled workers alike. A nice diversion material that fits neatly into the BJP’s general playbook.
It is important, however, to understand the change in Vande Mataram’s status beyond the simple paradigm of it being a diversion tactic to shift debate away from the Jantar Mantar-NEET protests. Why?
Because some 122 years ago, the slogan Vande Mataram galvanised large sections of Indians against British rule and became an integral part of the national imagination. Now, Vande Mataram is being sought to be used as a tool by the BJP to further its project of cultural imposition upon Indians.
This essay argues that the 2026 Amendment represents a transition from the idea of a more personal nationalism to a paradigm of imposed nationalism, arriving in the wake of the loosening grip of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. The amendment, along with the push to bring Vande Mataram on par with Jana Gana Mana, fits neatly within the Hindutva project of rewriting the symbolism of the Congress regime. Through an examination of the song’s literary, political, and constitutional history, this essay will demonstrate that the 2026 Amendment does not represent historical continuity, but rather a contemporary majoritarian redefinition of a complex national symbol.
What does the law say?
Before I go further, it is important to state the change brought in by The Prevention of Insults to National Honour (Amendment) Act, 2026 (hereafter, the 2026 Amendment), which amends the Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act, 1971 (the 1971 Act).
Section 3 of the 1971 Act, before the amendment, read as follows:
Prevention of singing of Indian National Anthem, etc. — whoever intentionally prevents the singing of the Indian National Anthem or causes disturbance to any assembly engaged in such singing shall be punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend to three years, or with fine, or with both.
The 2026 Amendment substituted the above section with the following:
3. Whoever, intentionally — (a) prevents the singing of the National Anthem or the National Song; or (b) causes disturbance to any assembly engaged in such singing, shall be punishable with imprisonment for a term which may extend to three years, or with fine, or with both.
The question is why?
A simple question to ask while analysing any material event is to ask why. Why should any law be made? Naturally, to address and engage with an issue in society that needs the moral, political, and social force of the law for it to be solved. Why should this specific song be given protection? Because it is being disrespected, and therefore, a proper protection regime is needed.
However, if one looks at the Statement of Objects and Reasons (SOR) for the 2026 Act, one would be amused by the lack of a problem statement, that is, the issue the amendment seeks to address. The SOR is an interpretative tool used to understand the circumstances surrounding the enactment of a law, or the problem the law was intended to solve. The SOR for the Vande Mataram Act says, essentially, three things:
- Jana Gana Mana is a protected National Symbol.
- Dr. Rajendra Prasad said in a speech that Vande Mataram shall be equally honoured on par with Jana Gana Mana.
- Therefore, to ensure that Vande Mataram is respected and protected, this amendment is being enacted.
There is no problem statement here. A problem statement would have looked something like this, even with minimum amount of effort on part of the government:
Owing to the fact that incidents of disrespecting the National Song have become frequent in recent times, it is fit to follow the ideal propounded by Dr. Rajendra Prasad to honour the National Song on par with the National Anthem, and to accord the former the same protection as the latter under the Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act, 1971.
We find no such basis for the amendment in the first place. We do, however, find the real reasons ex post. How? The government sent orders across the steel frame that is the Indian bureaucracy stating that official functions should be opened by singing the full version of Vande Mataram, that is, all six stanzas as opposed to the current convention of singing only the first two.
To put it in one sentence: the BJP wants India’s imagination with respect to its National Symbols reimagined in the way it sees them. Right now, Jana Gana Mana, the National Anthem, is written by Rabindranath Tagore, someone who a Modi can only try to imitate before an election but cannot claim to be either his guru or ideological predecessor. After all, Tagore’s nationalism was more humanistic than the most liberal ideas of nationalism. The flag, the song, and every other symbol bear the imprint of the Indian National Congress (INC) and its role in the independence movement. Therefore, the BJP wants to rewrite them using the means of law and power.
It is in this context that any further analysis of the current political developments, and of the Act, should be undertaken.
Reading between the lines
The operative provision of the act does two things. It punishes anyone who intentionally prevents the singing of the National Anthem or the National Song. It also punishes anyone who causes disturbance to an assembly engaged in that singing. Three years, a fine, or both.
Section 3A of the parent Act, inserted in 2003, adds a mandatory minimum of one year for a second conviction. Vande Mataram has thus been placed in the same level as Jana Gana Mana.
Weber’s old distinction between legality and legitimacy is useful here.[1] A statute may be perfectly legal, passed with the required majorities and notified on the appointed day, and still lack legitimacy, because it answers to the will of those in power rather than to any demonstrable public interest. The missing problem statement and reliance on a speech of a single leader is a testament to the fact that the government does not have a proper legitimate reason to do this, except for its aggressive enthusiasm to irk the cultural fabric of the country. Invoking Rajendra Prasad in these circumstances is a prop, not a justification. There is something faintly comic about a party pressing the words of a 1950 Congressman into service to authorise its own coercive statute.
What the government cannot invoke is more revealing than what it can. National integrity is off the table, because that would be a confession of failure over twelve years in office. The government’s own ideological ancestors on Vande Mataram are off the table too, because Savarkar, Golwalkar and Hedgewar were peripheral figures in the freedom struggle, and their writings on the song, where they exist, wilt on any honest comparison with those of Bose, Nehru or Tagore.
Historical Context
Origins
Bankim wrote the song around 1875 in a heavily Sanskritised Bengali and published it in Bangadarshan.[2] It was a regional lyric to the beauty of Bengal. It addressed the population of the Presidency and made no Pan-Indian claim. Seven years later Bankim placed it inside Anandamath, and its meaning was rewritten. The nation became a goddess, deified as a triad of Jagaddhatri, Kali and Durga. The song became the battle hymn of the santanas, the children who wage war for her honour. That war, and the point tends to get buried under a century of nationalist reception, is not fought against the British. It is fought against Muslims. The santanas torch houses, loot properties, and dream aloud of building temples on the sites of demolished mosques.[3] The novel’s climax welcomes British rule as friendly and necessary. A supernatural physician arrives to tell Satyananda to cease fighting, on the ground that the English will protect Hindu spiritual knowledge from further contamination.[4] It also important to note here that the current issue with the debate is not its origins. The analysis of the origins of the song should be done in a context that is more mature and is not charged with the fact the government wants every citizen to own it.
The slogan India chanted and the aftermath
Coming back to the timeline, in 1905, Lord Curzon partitioned Bengal along communal lines. Within months the opening stanzas of Vande Mataram were being sung at protests across the province. The stanzas travelled on their own, without the novel behind them. Protestors, weavers, students, boatmen carried the words into streets where most of those chanting had never opened Anandamath.
The ecumenical moment did not last. Aurobindo Ghose, writing in his weekly Bande Mataram between 1906 and 1908, undertook a deliberate sacralisation of the anti-colonial struggle. He called Bankim a seer. He called nationalism a religion. Patriotism, on his account, was Karma Yoga, Shaktipuja, a devotional discipline addressed to the Mother.[5] Aurobindo aligned the vocabulary of the national struggle with the theological structures of one religion, at the very moment the movement was acquiring a mass character.
The trouble was not that Hindus imagined the nation in Hindu terms. Every community imagines the nation in the vocabulary available to it.[6] The trouble was that this particular imagination was then offered as the imagination of all Indians, and those who could not sign on would be positioned first as reluctant, then as suspect. The line from Aurobindo’s Shaktipuja to the twenty-first-century slogan Iss desh mein rehna hai to Vande Mataram kehna hoga is neither short nor straight but it is a very real line.
The objections
By the late 1930s the fracture visible in the fine print of Anandamath had become audible in the public life of the Congress. Vande Mataram was by then the customary opening of party gatherings, and it was drawing objections. Muslim organisations found in it an idolatrous invocation of the motherland as a Hindu deity. Christian and Sikh groups objected too.
At the Muslim League’s Lucknow session in October 1937, Jinnah pressed this into a central charge against the Congress. His argument was that to insist on Vande Mataram was to insist on a majoritarian theological culture, and to require of the citizen that she be, in her aesthetic and religious sensibility, first a Hindu.
The Congress Working Committee met in Calcutta on 26 October 1937 under Nehru’s presidency, and it understood the danger. A subcommittee was set-up: Nehru, Gandhi, Azad, and Bose. The subcommittee with able advice from Rabindranath Tagore decided to endorse the first two stanzas of Vande Mataram and leaving out the later stanzas for they refer the country in a rather Hindu imagination or that other communities have objections to it.
The 1937 compromise is usually described as an accommodation of Muslim sentiment. That is true, and it is incomplete. What the CWC actually did was closer to what Isaiah Berlin later called value pluralism.[7] If a society is an amalgamation of communities with various commitments, be that of religious nature or otherwise, a single symbol cannot represent that society as a whole. The good thing about political wisdom is that in these kind of situations, it constructs bridges between various groups and creates a space that does not ask one section to fit into the imagination of the other. It is not a concession but a link in a long chain of actions that strive to create a pluralist society.
The Constituent Assembly and the Settlement of 1950
The compromise of 1937 cast a long shadow over the Constituent Assembly. As the Assembly moved towards finalising the national symbols, the argument that had been fought inside the Congress in the 1930s was fought again, this time on the floor of the House drafting the constitution of a new republic.
Purushottam Das Tandon led the conservative wing and pressed for the adoption of Vande Mataram as the sole National Anthem. The argument did have its force. The song had been sung on the gallows. It had been chanted in jails. It had been the last word on the lips of men and women marched to their deaths. To choose any other song, on this view, would insult the memory of the movement itself. Against Tandon stood a coalition of liberal Congressmen, minority representatives and others who saw that the historical memory of a movement cannot be the sole ground on which the symbols of a state are chosen. Jana Gana Mana had emerged in the interim as an alternative. Its language had no similar objections.
The Assembly did what has not been sufficiently appreciated. It chose not to resolve the argument by vote. It chose to resolve it by settlement. On January 24, 1950, Rajendra Prasad, in his capacity as President of the Assembly, made a statement rather than moved a resolution. Jana Gana Mana was the National Anthem. Vande Mataram was the National Song. The two would be honoured equally, and the National Song would have equal status.
Granville Austin noticed the framers’ persistent aversion to producing textual solutions that would freeze the resolution of live cultural disputes.[8] A statement by the presiding officer does not carry the force of law. It carries the force of morality. They were leaving room for the conscience of those who could not, for reasons rooted in the depths of their religious sensibility, sing the song without violence to themselves.
Compelled Speech and the Rights of Conscience
The 2026 Amendment converts this symbolic honorary status into a penal obligation. Its defenders will say, correctly, that the text prohibits only the intentional prevention of singing and the causing of disturbance to an assembly engaged in such singing. It does not, on its face, compel any citizen to sing. This is a formalist reading, and it disintegrates the moment one considers the environment in which the law will operate.
The Supreme Court addressed precisely this environment in Bijoe Emmanuel v. State of Kerala in 1986. Three Jehovah’s Witness children had refused to sing the National Anthem in their school, on the ground that their conscience forbade singing an anthem to anything other than God. Chinnappa Reddy J. held that standing respectfully during the anthem was sufficient, and that compelling the singing violated Article 19 (1) (a), which contains within the right to freedom of speech the right to remain silent, and Article 25, which protects freedom of conscience. The judgment is short. It rests on a proposition of considerable constitutional depth. The state cannot demand of the citizen a positive act of expression as the price of belonging. If the singing of the National Anthem itself cannot be compelled, the singing of Vande Mataram, whose theological register is far more textured, cannot be compelled either. Anything else would be a constitutional absurdity.
The trouble is that the Amendment does not need to compel singing on its face in order to compel singing in practice. In a polarised atmosphere the silent refusal that Bijoe Emmanuel protects can be re-characterised by a local complainant, an aggrieved neighbour or an ambitious sub-inspector as an act of causing disturbance or of showing disrespect. When the boundaries of a law are unclear and its penalties are severe, it poses a risk of citizens retreating well behind the boundaries. The right to remain silent becomes the risk of remaining silent, and the risk becomes prohibitive.
Briefly, the argument for the Vande Mataram Amendment is three pronged. One, if it was declared that anthem and song are to be treated same, then the statutory protections also should be the same. Second, the act does not ask everyone to sing. It asks people to not disturb the singing or prevent the singing. Third, the more boilerplate that the Parliament in its own wisdom has chosen to protect a national symbol and it does not need to give a layered justification for its decision.
These are respectable arguments but they fail for reasons worth spelling out.
If the framers wanted to legislate it or settle it, they would have, then and there. To make an active choice to not move it for vote shows that they let the national symbols be adoptable for all communities. Secondly, in an atmosphere where people have been deliberately charged with jingoism, the test in Bijoe Emmanuel will only hold until the Courts show the intention to. Once the crowd starts to expect that the whole of the song is to be sung, it is to the Crowd’s wisdom to act when someone does not sing the whole of the song, although it is not legally mandated. Thirdly, a polity’s right to protect its symbols cannot exceed the polity’s own core commitments. India’s foundational commitment, spelled out in the Preamble and vindicated across sixty years of adjudication, is to a plurality that does not require assimilation as the price of belonging and therefore, if the state wants to nevertheless protect the song, it should give not just a layered justification but also a constitutional one.
There is a deeper worry beneath all three of the above arguments. Ambedkar closed his final address to the Constituent Assembly with a warning about hero-worship in Indian public life. Bhakti in religion may be a road to salvation, he said. In politics it is a sure road to degradation and eventual dictatorship.[9] The 2026 Amendment is not, of course, a dictatorial measure. But its logic is the logic Ambedkar was warning against. It is the transfer of devotional intensity from the temple to the state, and the enforcement of such devotion, by criminal sanction. Once the state acquires the taste for compelling public affirmations of its own sacredness, the appetite tends to grow and that is a slippery slope.
Conclusion
The 2026 Amendment is best read not as a technical amendment to a sixty-year-old statute but as a political act of considerable ambition. Its ambition is to redraw the symbolic constitution of the Republic, and to accomplish through the ordinary instruments of legislation what its authors could not accomplish through the constituent process. It substitutes for the delicate settlement of 1937 and 1950 a punitive uniformity. And it does so in the absence of any demonstrable public harm that might justify the criminal law.
Defending the song against this treatment is not diminishing it. It is insisting on the terms on which the song became precious in the first place. It was sung by Bose in Berlin and by peasants in Chittagong. It was sung by Muslims in Bombay and by students in Madras. It was sung, in its truncated form, at Congress gatherings for a decade after 1937, and it was sung with more feeling for having been truncated, because the truncation was itself an act of respect towards those who could not sing the whole.
A republic honours its symbols by permitting their voluntary embrace. It dishonours them by conscripting the criminal law to enforce their recital. The framers understood this in 1950 with a clarity that their successors have chosen to forget. The task of the citizen in the years to come is to remember what has been forgotten, and to insist, patiently and in public, that a song sung under threat is not the song manifesting the true national consciousness.
(The author is part of the legal research team of the organisation)
[1]Weber, Economy and Society, on the distinction between legality and legitimacy in modern domination.
[2]Bhattacharya, Vande Mataram: The Biography of a Song, chapters 1 and 2.
[3]Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation, on the maternal figure in Bankim; Kaviraj, The Unhappy Consciousness, on the novelistic construction of nationalist imagination.
[4]Noorani, “How Secular is Vande Mataram?”, Frontline, 2 January 1999.
[5]Ghose, Bande Mataram (weekly edition, 1906 to 1908).
[6]Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, on the “inner” spiritual domain of Indian nationalism and its Hindu inflection.
[7]Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty” and the essays in The Crooked Timber of Humanity.
[8]Austin, The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation, on the framers’ preference for procedural over substantive resolution of cultural disputes.
[9]Ambedkar, address to the Constituent Assembly, November 25, 1949: “Bhakti in religion may be a road to the salvation of the soul. But in politics, Bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship.”
Related:
Rajya Sabha passes Vande Mataram bill as NCRB data reveals high pendency, low convictions