A video of a Congress district leader singing Amar Sonar Bangla—Bangladesh's national anthem—at a party event in Assam's Sribhumi district on October 28, 2025, has triggered a political firestorm, with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) accusing the opposition of being "Bangladesh-obsessed" and promoting a "Greater Bangladesh" agenda. The BJP's Assam unit and minister Ashok Singhal linked the incident to a controversial map in a book gifted by Bangladesh's interim Chief Advisor Muhammad Yunus to Pakistan's military chief last week, depicting parts of Northeast India—including Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, and Tripura—as Bangladeshi territory. Singhal claimed the anthem's rendition exposed Congress's alleged decades-long facilitation of "illegal Miya infiltration" to alter Assam's demography for vote-bank politics.

Composed by Rabindranath Tagore in 1905 as a protest against the British partition of Bengal, Amar Sonar Bangla celebrates the region's natural beauty and cultural unity, predating Bangladesh's 1971 independence by 66 years and its adoption as the national anthem by seven decades. The song remains a shared cultural artefact across borders, routinely sung at events in West Bengal and Assam's Bengali-majority Barak Valley, which includes Sribhumi (formerly Karimganj) and borders Bangladesh. Bengali restaurants nationwide, including in Delhi, bear its name, underscoring its pre-partition heritage rather than political allegiance.

Congress has not responded, but the incident occurs amid strained India-Bangladesh ties following Sheikh Hasina's ouster and flight to Delhi in 2024, with India raising minority atrocities and Dhaka pivoting toward Pakistan.

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The BJP's outrage leverages the Yunus book map—titled Art of Triumph: Bangladesh's New Dawn—to stoke fears of territorial ambition, despite no official Bangladeshi endorsement. Critics argue the attack misrepresents cultural expression as sedition, especially in a linguistically diverse region where Tagore's works transcend borders. Social media amplified the row, with #CongressExposed trending, but historians note Amar Sonar Bangla was once proposed as India's anthem before Jana Gana Mana, highlighting its pan-Bengali resonance.

As Assam gears up for bypolls, the episode exemplifies weaponised cultural symbols in polarised politics, pitting regional identity against national security narratives while ignoring Amar Sonar Bangla's historical context as a unifying anti-colonial anthem.

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