Posted on August 20, 2026
The controversy about Vande Mataram will escalate further as the BJP National president Nitin Nabin accused Congress of nationalising the insult. On Wednesday, the Congress Working Committee decided to restrict singing or playing the song to just the first two verses as it has been since 1937. Nabin reacted to the decision by saying they were making the insult their policy and went as far as calling them the new Muslim League.
India will mark the 150th anniversary of the composition of Vande Mataram by singing the song across the country as part of a government-sponsored campaign that will last throughout the year and see the country unite in celebration. The anniversary comes after Prime Minister Narendra Modi accused Congress of diluting Vande Mataram to cater to Muslims during a Lok Sabha debate.
What Nabin Said
In a post on X (formerly Twitter) in Hindi, Nabin claimed that Congress has finally converted its long-standing “insult” to Vande Mataram into a resolution as its working committee has decided to sang only the first two stanza of the song at various party functions. He alleged that it was an insult to the martyrs who carried the song in their hearts while laying down their lives for the motherland.
He went further, alleging that Congress has repeatedly compromised the nation’s dignity to protect a particular vote bank, and said this was proof of the party’s “hunger” for that vote bank rather than a genuine political position. “The Congress has now become the new Muslim League of today,” he said, invoking the pre-independence party associated with the demand for Partition, a comparison the BJP has reached for before.
The Origins of the Two-Stanza Version
Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge dismissed the BJP’s narrative on the 1937 call, contending that it was not made by Gandhi, Nehru, Tagore or Bose but all of them together. He also accused Union home minister and BJP leader Amit Shah of maligning Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Nehru as anti-national and said that Congress workers had sung Vande Mataram while jailed as part of the non-cooperation movement in 1921, asking Shah and his predecessors where they were then.
Addressing the issue in the Rajya Sabha, Amit Shah said that the politics of appeasement started when the song was bifurcated and that history would have been different if it had not happened. Kharge said the song should be a unifying force, and not used as a “political weapon” every alternate year.
Congress Hits Back
Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge has rejected the BJP’s framing, arguing the 1937 call wasn’t Nehru’s alone but a collective decision involving Gandhi, Tagore, and Bose. He’s accused BJP leaders, including the Prime Minister and Home Minister Amit Shah, of using the issue to disparage Nehru, and pointed to Congress workers chanting Vande Mataram while being jailed during the 1921 non-cooperation movement, questioning where the BJP’s predecessors stood at the time.
Addressing the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha, Union home minister Amit Shah said that the politics of appeasement began when the song was split and if it was not done, history would have been different. Meanwhile, Kharge said that Vande Mataram should be a uniting song for all rather than a divisive political tool that the BJP was using every alternate year.
Why This Keeps Resurfacing
Part of what’s giving this fresh urgency is timing. The government recently made full recitation of the national song part of official protocol, and the ongoing 150th anniversary commemorations run from November 2025 through November 2026. Against that backdrop, Congress’s public reaffirmation of the two-stanza version reads, to the BJP, as a deliberate statement rather than routine practice. Congress, for its part, maintains it is simply continuing a position the party has held for nearly nine decades.
Conclusion
For now, this remains a war of words rather than a dispute with concrete policy consequences, but it fits a recurring pattern of both parties using Vande Mataram to stake out competing ideas of nationalism and secularism. With the 150th anniversary commemorations continuing for months and Parliament having already debated the topic once this year, this is unlikely to be the last round of sparring over how much of the song gets sung, and by whom.