Vande Mataram, India's national song, received legal protection on Thursday after the Parliament passed a bill making any insult to it a punishable offence, reviving a long-running debate over its place in the country's history and identity.
The Prevention of Insults to National Honour (Amendment) Bill, 2026, extends to Vande Mataram the legal protections currently available to the national anthem, Jana Gana Mana.
It makes intentionally preventing the singing of the national song or causing a disturbance during its rendition a criminal offence.
The offences are punishable with up to three years' imprisonment, a fine, or both. A second and every subsequent conviction carries a mandatory minimum prison term of one year.
The Bill was passed by voice vote in the Lok Sabha amid noisy scenes.
Replying to a brief debate in the lower House, in which only two members participated, Minister of State for Home Nityananda Rai said the Congress should have accorded Vande Mataram its due respect during its 76 years in power, but instead resorted to appeasement politics.
"For Ek Bharat, Shreshtra Bharat, we need the complete (all six stanzas) Vande Mataram song," Rai said, concluding his reply with a chant of Vande Mataram.
The amendments moved by the Opposition were rejected by the House.
DMK MP A Raja later tore up some documents and threw them towards the Well of the House, while party colleague K Kanimozhi opposed the Bill, calling it a "Hindutva agenda" brought masquerading as nationalism.
"It is against federalism. You cannot impose nationalism by bringing a law; the song goes against the secularism of the country. The founding fathers had the wisdom to stop only with two stanzas, but today you are trying to polarise the country by making it compulsory and making it a criminal offence if we do not sing all the six stanzas," she said.
BJP MP Sambit Patra said the Congress, during its 76 years in power, did not give Vande Mataram the respect it deserved as the national song.
The national song has continued to trigger debate over its "secular" or "anti-Islamic" character and the role it played in India's freedom struggle.
A song at the centre of debate
In November last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said important stanzas of the national song were dropped in 1937, which sowed the seeds of Partition, and asserted that such a "divisive mindset" remains a challenge for the country.
"Unfortunately, in 1937, important stanzas of Vande Mataram... its soul was removed. The division of Vande Mataram also sowed the seeds of partition," he said.
Since its origin in 1875, when Bengali novelist and poet Bankim Chandra Chatterjee wrote it as an ode to the motherland, personified as Goddess Kali, the poem has repeatedly found itself at the centre of political controversy.
First published in 1882 in the literary journal Bangadarshan as part of Chatterjee's novel Anandamath, Vande Mataram had, by the turn of the century, become a rallying cry against British rule, popularised by nationalist leaders of the Indian National Congress.
According to a 1953 publication by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, it was first sung at a political gathering during the 1896 session of the Indian National Congress, with music composed by Rabindranath Tagore.
The song gradually acquired the character of an anthem as the anti-Partition movement in Bengal gathered momentum in the early 1900s. It was during this period that Muslim leaders first raised objections to its widespread use.
The original Vande Mataram, a poem comprising six stanzas, contains strong religious imagery in its later verses, invoking and paying obeisance to the goddesses Durga and Lakshmi.
In his presidential address to the second session of the All India Muslim League, held in Amritsar on December 30, 1908, Syed Ali Imam said his "heart is filled with despair and disappointment" when "the most advanced province of India put forward the sectarian cry of 'Bande Mataram' as the national cry... and the suspicion that, under the cloak of nationalism, Hindu nationalism is preached in India becomes a conviction."
The poem, particularly its opening words — Vande Mataram — gradually became the slogan of the nationalist movement.
'Must be purely voluntary'
An article in the Economic and Political Weekly by senior Supreme Court lawyer A G Noorani notes that, at its 25th session in Lucknow in 1937, the Muslim League described Vande Mataram as "not merely positively anti-Islamic and idolatrous in its inspiration and ideas, but definitely subversive of the growth of genuine nationalism in India".
The article was written after objections were raised to the singing of the national song in a Bombay municipal school in 1973.
Days later, the Congress Working Committee, which met in Calcutta on October 26, 1937, under the presidentship of Jawaharlal Nehru, adopted a resolution stating that "wherever Bande 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 Bande Mataram song".
Mahatma Gandhi, who associated "the purest national spirit with it", admitted that Vande Mataram had "gripped and enthralled" him, but said it had never occurred to him that it was "a Hindu song or meant only for Hindus".
Even after Independence, Gandhi cautioned against imposing Vande Mataram. "No doubt, every act... must be purely voluntary on the part of either partner," he had said at Alipore on August 23, 1947, according to Noorani.
Over the following decades, the issue of singing the national song has repeatedly resurfaced, drawing both support and opposition.
One of the biggest controversies came in 2009, when Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind in Deoband, Uttar Pradesh, issued a fatwa asking Muslims not to sing the national song.
Opposing the move, more than 100 Muslim scholars, social activists, actors and writers issued a statement saying the debate over Vande Mataram had been settled in the 1930s with the consent of the then Jamiat leadership.
"We strongly condemn the Jamiat move to unnecessarily provoke a controversy around Vande Mataram at this juncture," the statement said.
The issue resurfaced in 2017 when BJP corporator Sandip Patel proposed making the singing of Vande Mataram mandatory in Mumbai civic-run schools.
In 2018, then BJP president Amit Shah held the Congress responsible for the country's Partition, alleging that the party had surrendered to the politics of appeasement.
(With inputs from PTI)
