Congress Quotes Gandhi-Era Document to Counter PM Modi’s Vande Mataram Remark

Congress launched a blistering counter-offensive against Prime Minister Narendra Modi, accusing him of “distorting history” and “insulting” Rabindranath Tagore by claiming that the 1937 Congress decision to adopt only the first two stanzas of Vande Mataram sowed the seeds of Partition. General Secretary Jairam Ramesh declared it “shameful” for Modi to attribute a “divisive mindset” to the Nobel laureate, who had personally advised Jawaharlal Nehru and the Congress Working Committee to retain solely the opening verses for their universal appeal while later stanzas—embedded in Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s Anandamath—risked offending Muslim sensibilities.

Ramesh quoted Tagore’s October 26, 1937, letter to Nehru, preserved in historian Sabyasachi Bhattacharya’s authoritative work, where the poet wrote: “To me the spirit of tenderness and devotion expressed in its first portion made a special appeal… I see nothing to offend any sect or community.” He revealed that Tagore himself first sang Vande Mataram at the 1896 Congress session in Calcutta, cementing its status as a unifying anthem. The CWC resolution three days later—attended by Mahatma Gandhi, Sardar Patel, Netaji Bose, and Maulana Azad—mirrored Tagore’s counsel verbatim, and the same two-stanza version was officially enshrined as India’s national song by the Constituent Assembly on January 24, 1950.

Dismissing Modi’s remarks at the 150th-anniversary commemoration—where he released a stamp and coin—as election-season propaganda, Ramesh cited Bankimchandra’s own anti-caste writings in Samya (1872-76) to underscore that neither the song’s creator nor Tagore ever intended division. “The Prime Minister must render an unconditional apology to Gurudev and to India’s founding fathers,” Ramesh demanded, adding that the RSS, absent from the freedom struggle, had no moral standing to lecture on patriotic symbols.

As the row escalates ahead of Bihar’s second-phase polling, Congress positions itself as the true custodian of Vande Mataram’s inclusive legacy, challenging Modi to confront present-day failures—economic inequality, unemployment, and foreign-policy setbacks—instead of rewriting history to demonise Tagore and the Congress that made the song a national treasure.