At an event in Kolkata, Bharatiya Janata Party president Amit Shah stated that, had the nation adopted the original full version of Vande Mataram, India would not have been partitioned. Maybe, maybe not. What is now the National Song had been originally published as a five-stanza poem in Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Anand Math. Rabindranath Tagore rendered the full song at an all India Congress Committee session for the first time in 1896.
Subsequently, however, there was disquiet in some sections of the Congress as leaders believed that the later portion of the song would be objectionable to the Muslims since it mentioned goddess Durga. The AICC eventually decided to drop the last three stanzas. But even this accommodation failed to appease large sections of the minority community, and we see that attitude to this day. They refuse to accept or sing Vande Mataram, and have further equated the song as a symbol of Hindutva revivalism. Their posturing is unfortunate, given that Vande Mataram had been the rallying cry of freedom in the colonial era and that every Indian freedom-fighter, Hindu or otherwise, used it to arouse nationalist sentiments against the British rule. The question that needs to be, therefore, asked is the following: What did the Congress achieve by modifying the National Song? The Muslims, or at least a large section of them, still do not subscribe to it. On the other hand, the party opened itself to criticism of appeasement. Even the latter would have been explainable had results been positive. That such pandering does not work because it leads to further demands, has been obvious. The Congress, goaded by Mahatma Gandhi, backed the Caliphate demand for Turkey in order to draw support from Indian Muslims for the freedom struggle.
But what it got in return was the Moplah violence in which hundreds of Hindus were massacred and hundreds more hounded out of their homes by rampaging Muslim mobs in the Malabar region. Quite a few of the demands raised by the Muslim League were agreed to by a reluctant Congress because Mahatma Gandhi insisted on the goodwill. Yet the Muslim League eventually and successfully campaigned for India’s partition. The situation today is such that even the rendering of the National Anthem has been dragged into controversy. Suddenly it has become fashionable to display one’s ‘right’ by not standing up in honour when the National Anthem is played. Any insistence on giving it respect is considered an act of belligerent nationalism!
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