KOLKATA: Bharatiya Janata Party president Amit Shah on Wednesday blamed the Partition of India in 1947 on the Congress’ adoption of only two stanzas of Vande Mataram as the national song in 1937.
Speaking on novelist Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s 180th birth anniversary on the first day of his two-day visit to West Bengal, Shah said: “If Congress hadn’t linked Vande Mataram with religion and adopted only two paragraphs of Vande Mataram as the national song to appease a section of the population, the country wouldn’t have been partitioned.”
“Many blame the two-nation theory of Muslim League for the partition, but I believe that the adoption of only two stanzas of Vande Mataram as an appeasement policy bolstered the voices of the secessionists. That was a grave mistake and it pains me till this very day,” he added.
“We are a geo-cultural country and not a geopolitical country. Both Shyama Prasad Mookerjee and Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay in different eras promoted cultural nationalism in India,” he added.
Meanwhile, Bengal’s intellectuals gave a lukewarm response to the BJP’s call for a meeting of intellectuals, with only a handful of famous personalities attending the meeting.
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