Weaponising the law preventing insults to Vande Mataram: Lessons from Tagore, Gandhi and the Constituent Assembly

EARLIER THIS WEEK, both the Houses of Parliament passed the Prevention of Insults to National Honour (Amendment) Bill, 2026, initiated by the Modi regime,  after it restored, in February 2026, the last four stanzas of Vande Mataram, earlier dropped by Rabindranath Tagore and the Constituent Assembly in 1950.

Section 3 of the Bill notes  that:

“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 import of such a  legislation could be better appreciated in the backdrop of the commencement of the 150th anniversary of Vande Mataram in November 2025 and the fabricated remarks made by the BJP that the Congress party, “brazenly pandering to its communal agenda under the presidentship of Jawaharlal Nehru, adopted only a truncated version as the party’s national song in 1937.”

Prime Minister Modi aggravated it by his egregious utterances that dropping of  important stanzas of the national song ‘Vande Mataram’  in 1937 sowed the seeds of partition of India. All such fallacious observations represented distortion of history.

Tagore and Vande Mataram

Therefore, the contents and import of the above Bill providing penal measures has to be located in the context of the restoration of the last four stanzas of Vande Mataram which were, in fact, dropped by Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore. His robust reasoning and convincing logic to retain only the first two stanzas of Vande Mataram  were  outlined  on  October 30, 1937 in his  article “Vande Mataram.” He remarked in it that he himself discarded the last four stanzas when he first sang the opening   stanza in the 1896 session of the Indian National Congress in Calcutta,  organised under the leadership of its President, Rahmatullah Sayani. 

Justifying his decision to drop the last four stanzas he poetically wrote, “To me, the spirit of tenderness and devotion expressed in its first portion and the emphasis it gave to the 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 and from those portions of the book of which it is part, with all the sentiments of which, brought up as I was in this monotheistic ideals of my father, I could have no sympathy.”

He explained that Vande Mataram first played the role of national anthem uniting people of all faiths, in his words, “against the decree of separation” hurled upon Bengal (partition of Bengal in 1905) and later became a national slogan during freedom movement for liberating our country from colonial rule.

“I freely concede,” he remarked, “that the whole of Bankim's Vande Mataram poem, read together with its context, is liable to be interpreted in ways that might wound Muslim susceptibilities…” 

He then firmly put forth  that “… national song, though derived from it, which has spontaneously come to consist only of the first two stanzas of the original poem and need not remind us every time of the whole of it, much less of the story with which it was accidentally associated.” Those first two stanzas according to Tagore “acquired a separate individuality and an inspiring significance of its own” and so, he saw  nothing in it “to offend any sect or community.”

Mahatma Gandhi in his speech at a  prayer meeting in Calcutta on August 23, 1947, recalled how in 1937 had Tagore decided to retain  the  first two stanzas of Vande Mataram as those were free from any objection and that decision was respectfully accepted by both the Hindu and the Muslim members of the Congress Working Committee.  

So, the restoration of the four stanzas of Vande Mataram by the Modi regime in February this year is inconsistent with Tagore’s decision anchored in cogent and persuasive reasoning and has the strong potentiality of creating conditions “to offend any sect or community”.

Therefore, the aforementioned Bill prescribing punishment and fine or both to those who would prevent the singing, among others, of the National song or cause disturbance to any assembly engaged in such singing should be seen with scepticism in the context of Tagore’s sublime intention not “to offend any sect or community” by the act of recitation of Vande Mataram.