SRINAGAR: The political row between the ruling National Conference and its alliance partner Congress in Jammu and Kashmir has widened over rendition of full Vande Mataram. With Congress' Tariq Hamid Karra accused Chief Minister Omar Abdullah of being “detached from reality” and questioned whether anyone had been jailed in Kerala where only the first two stanzas were sung at government events after Abdullah stated that singing the full version has become a statutory obligation and questioned whether Congress wanted Kashmiris to be put in jail for failing to stand when national song was sung.
In a lengthy post on X, Karra said Omar’s comment is detached from reality and “the public has nothing to do with this debate. It is the government that is expected to stand upright.
Responding to Omar’s question on whether Congress wanted more Kashmiris to be jailed for failing to stand during the full rendition of Vande Mataram, Karra said; “Did a single person in Kerala go to jail when its government chose to sing only the first two stanzas of Vande Mataram at the Independence Day parade?"
"Are we wrong to expect our CM to be equally capable of standing up for secular and inclusive values as the CMs of Keralam, Tamil Nadu, and now even Karnataka and Telangana have done by limiting Vande Mataram to the first two stanzas at state events,” he said.
The Congress and National Conference are at loggerheads over the full rendition of Vande Mataram at official functions attended by the Chief Minister, ministers and senior National Conference leaders.
“At the 1st International Film Festival of Jammu & Kashmir (IFFJK) 2026, titled Rang-e-Cinema, was a “state event” organised jointly by the Directorate of Information and Public Relations (DIPR), J&K, and the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) — and was inaugurated by the Hon’ble CM Sahab himself. So, who else was or wasn’t present is irrelevant — a superfluous detail meant only to distract from the core issue,” Karra said.
Omar has defended the government position and hit out at Congress, saying, “Either they (Congress) should have stopped this in Parliament. But the law has been made. In the function, where two governors, one Lieutenant Governor and the acting Chief Justice of J&K High Court, there will definitely be a national anthem. And this year, legally where there is a national anthem, the full stanzas of Vande Mataram have become compulsory”.
He said this is not only for J&K but for the whole country. “Where there are states of Congress, this will also happen there in government functions.Omar said those people who do not stand up during Vande mataram, legal action can be taken about them. “What does the Congress want… that more Kashmiris should be jailed. On this pretext. This is a statutory obligation,” he said.
Congress leaders, however, have strongly opposed the full rendition of the song at official functions. “The full version of Vande Mataram sits uneasily with the syncretic and pluralist ethos that our freedom fighters envisioned and nurtured for India. For us, the considered judgment of Mahatma Gandhi, Pandit Nehru, Sardar Patel, Subhash Chandra Bose, Rajendra Prasad, Acharya Narendra Dev, Maulana Azad, Sarojini Naidu and J.B. Kripalani — shaped in no small part by the counsel of Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore — remains paramount. With respect and humility, we would like our allies to honour the wisdom and judgment of our freedom fighters, and stand with us in singing only the version of this beautiful and historic song that they adopted. That version was chosen deliberately, to keep the song from being communalised — a threat as real today as it was then. Upholding it is how we uphold the secular, inclusive character of our Republic,” Congress general secretary K C Venugopal had said in a long post on X.
Karra had earlier also expressed concern over the National Conference government’s decision to sing the full version, saying the alliance partner had disregarded what he called the “considered evolution” of the song’s place in India’s national life.He said the adopted version represented a deliberate balance between preserving the historic and emotional significance of Vande Mataram and respecting India’s plural ethos and constitutional values.
