AIMIM President Asaduddin Owaisi stunned Lok Sabha on Monday with a thunderous intervention during the special discussion commemorating 150 years of Vande Mataram, declaring in unmistakable terms that any attempt to fuse patriotism with a single religion or religious symbol strikes at the very soul of the Constitution and will inevitably widen dangerous communal fault lines across the country.

Quoting the Preamble verbatim, Owaisi reminded the House that India’s founding document begins with the sovereign assertion “We the People of India” and deliberately avoids invoking any god, goddess or religious identity, underscoring that the liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship enshrined therein forms the unbreakable foundation of Indian democracy and prohibits the State from ever becoming the dominion of one faith.

Drawing directly from Constituent Assembly records, the Hyderabad MP revealed that multiple amendments proposing to open the Preamble in the name of a deity or to impose Vande Mataram as a compulsory national anthem were debated at length and consciously rejected by the framers, who chose secular equality over majoritarian symbolism, making it constitutionally impermissible to weaponise any song as a mandatory loyalty test.

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In a devastating historical riposte, Owaisi exposed that while Indian Muslims categorically rejected Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s two-nation theory and chose to remain in secular India, the political forebears of those now preaching ultra-nationalism had openly formed coalition governments with the Muslim League in Sindh, Bengal and North-West Frontier Province in 1942 and actively recruited 1.5 lakh soldiers to bolster British war efforts against Netaji’s INA.

Concluding with unflinching clarity, Owaisi asserted that genuine love for the motherland flows naturally in every citizen’s heart irrespective of faith, but forcibly tying nationalism to specific religious rituals, texts or symbols contradicts the Constitution’s guarantee of equal citizenship and risks permanently fracturing the plural fabric that has held India together the world’s largest democracy for seventy-five years.

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