The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) on January 28 notified the first set of protocols for singing Vande Mataram, the national song, directing that all six stanzas of the composition shall be sung during official functions.
With this directive, the Centre has broken with the position taken by the leadership of the Congress from 1937 onwards, when some objections to the song cropped up from sections of the Muslim community on the ground that it was an invocation to Hindu goddesses.
The Indian Express reported on January 24 that the MHA recently convened a meeting, where senior officials, including from other ministries, discussed whether rules or instructions should be framed on the circumstances in which the national song may be sung, whether it should be sung alongside the national anthem Jana Gana Mana, and whether acts of disrespect should attract penalties.
The first two stanzas of Vande Mataram – till now the national song – describe the beauty of the motherland, the third stanza says that crores of arms are ready to fight for it, the fourth says that crores are ready to wield sharp swords to protect it, the fifth says that its image is carved out in every temple and shrine, and the sixth likens the motherland to goddesses Durga, Lakshmi and Saraswati.
Written by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Vande Mataram emerged as a rallying cry during the Swadeshi movement (1905–08), becoming closely associated with the freedom struggle. While the Constituent Assembly accorded the song equal honour and respect alongside the national anthem, there had been no compulsory etiquette, posture, or legal requirement associated with singing or reciting the national song.
According to R K Prabhu’s book Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and the Vande Mataram Song, which is available at the Prime Minister’s Museum and Library (PMML), the Congress Working Committee (CWC), the party’s highest decision-making body, had adopted a lengthy resolution on the song in October 1937.
The resolution said that since the song was composed before Chatterjee’s book Anandamath was written, it should be considered separate from it. “The song and the words ‘Vande Mataram’ were considered seditious by the British government and were sought to be suppressed by violence and intimidation. At a famous session of the Bengal Provincial Conference held in Barisal in April 1906, under the presidentship of A Rasul, a brutal lathi charge was made by the police on the delegates and volunteers… Delegates were beaten so severely as they cried ‘Vande Mataram’ that they fell down senseless,” the resolution said. “Since then,… innumerable instances of sacrifice and suffering all over the country have been associated with ‘Vande Mataram’ and men and women have not hesitated to face death even with that cry on their lips.”
The CWC’s resolution stated: “Gradually the use of the first two stanzas of the song spread to other provinces and a certain national significance began to attach to them. The rest of the song was very seldom used and is even now known to few persons. These two stanzas described in tender language the beauty of the motherland and the abundance of her gifts. There was absolutely nothing in them to which objection could be taken from the religious or any other point of view…. Indeed the reference in it to thirty crores of Indians makes it clear that it was meant to apply to all the people of India. At no time, however, was this song, or any other song, formally adopted by the Congress as the national anthem of India. But popular usage gave it a special and national importance.”
The CWC feels, the resolution said, “that past associations, with their long record of suffering for the cause, as well as popular usage, have made the first two stanzas of this song a living and inseparable part of our national movement and as such they must command our affection and respect”.
It said, “There is nothing in these stanzas to which any one can take exception. The other stanzas of the song are little known and hardly ever sung. They contain certain allusions and a religious ideology which may not be in keeping with the ideology of other religious groups in India.”
“The Committee recommend that wherever the ‘Vande Mataram’ is sung at national gatherings only the first two stanzas should be sung, with perfect freedom to the organisers to sing any other song of an unobjectionable character, in addition to, or in the place of, the ‘Vande Mataram’ song,” the resolution added.
India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru said in a note to the Cabinet on May 21, 1948, that Jana Gana Mana was more amenable to orchestral rendering than Vande Mataram, which was deeply respected by Indians. He said that but for the Governor of Central Provinces, the other Governors also had the same opinion.
On January 24, 1950, when the Constituent Assembly met for the last time, Rajendra Prasad, who was on the same day elected unopposed as the first President of India, announced that Jana Gana Mana would be the national anthem, and that Vande Mataram would have a status equivalent to it as the inspiration behind the freedom struggle. Here, he meant the first two stanzas of the song would be the national song of India.
The song appeared in Anandamath – the story of a rebellion of Sanyasis (monks) in the context of a famine where Muslims are seen as adversaries – six years after it was written in 1875. Rabindranath Tagore set it to tune and sang it for the first time at the Congress session of 1896. While it was repeatedly deployed in the movement against the Partition of Bengal in 1905, it soon spread across the country and became a rallying cry of the freedom struggle.
It was only in 1937 that it was truncated for official purposes by the Congress – something that Prime Minister Narendra Modi said – in the Lok Sabha on December 8, 2025, during a debate on 150 years of the song – led eventually to the Partition of India. He alleged that Nehru had truncated the song under pressure from Mohammad Ali Jinnah.
Congress’s Wayanad MP Priyanka Gandhi Vadra told the Lok Sabha that the decision was not Nehru’s alone but a collective one. “By raising questions on the form of the national song which was accepted by the Constituent Assembly and endorsed by icons including Mahatma Gandhi, Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajendra Prasad, Acharya Narendra Dev, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Rabindranath Tagore and B R Ambedkar, the PM has insulted those great men… denigrated the tall leaders who were members of the Constituent Assembly… (and reflected) his anti-Constitution mindset,” she alleged.
Historian Tanika Sarkar told The Indian Express that the objections raised against the song, leading to its truncation to two stanzas, were two-fold: “the later stanzas become a call to war where Muslims are the adversary in the Anandmath, and the motherland here acquires the form of a Hindu goddess that alienates Muslims.”
Former Rajya Sabha MP Swapan Dasgupta says in his book Awakening Bharat Mata, “In the annals of Hindu nationalism, the story of Vande Mataram from being the icon of the national movement to becoming an extra… epitomised betrayal and a distortion of nationhood. For all those associated with the RSS parivar and the BJP, continuing attachment to Vande Mataram – without, at the same time, undermining the importance of the national anthem – has become an article of faith.” Dasgupta asserts that it’s customary to sing the whole song – and not just the first two stanzas – at the Sangh events.
Dasgupta says that the Muslim opposition to it put the Congress in a quandary, as the party under Nehru, and even later, was increasingly trying to be seen as “secular” and shed all Hindu imagery. “In the process, it vacated a space that was gleefully appropriated by Hindu nationalism as its very own,” Dasgupta argues. “The slow transition of Vande Mataram and Bharat Mata from being a mainstay of the Congress to becoming identified with the BJP epitomised this shift.”