Kolkata: With Trinamool sharpening its ‘Vande Mataram‘ pitch, alleging that “those whose political ancestors submitted mercy petitions to colonial rulers now seek to adjudicate Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore’s patriotism”, BJP on Friday argued that the national song had a much wider acceptability among Bengal’s freedom fighters, including Tagore.TMC‘s Rajya Sabha MP Ritabrata Banerjee said: “There have been references made suggesting that had ‘Vande Mataram’, and not ‘Jana Gana Mana‘, been our national anthem in the first place, there would have been no Partition. I urge these leaders to come to Bengal, take a microphone, and spell it out clearly in public that Tagore was responsible for Bengal’s Partition. People in Bengal will surely help you understand who Tagore and Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay are.”Posting the MP’s statement, TMC wrote on X: “Bengal does not accept performative nationalism masquerading as cultural guardianship. Our icons are not instruments of partisan theatre; they are civilizational beacons. And Bengal will answer this appropriation, decisively, in 2026.”That the 52-second ‘Jana Gana Mana’ would be the national anthem and the one-minute-nine-second ‘Vande Mataram’ would be the national song was accepted by the Constituent Assembly on Jan 24, 1950, Banerjee pointed out.“While altering this, there was no discussion, no debate. An executive fiat cannot suddenly dictate that a three-minute-10-second version of ‘Vande Mataram’ must be sung before ‘Jana Gana Mana’. This is how fascists work. This is the cultural hegemony that BJP wants to impose,” he said.TMC said “cultural reverence cannot be imposed by executive fiat; when symbolism is weaponised, it ceases to be homage and becomes politics. BJP has repeatedly demonstrated its ideological discomfort with Kabiguru Rabindranath Tagore, going so far as to entertain the absurd claim that ‘Jana Gana Mana’ was composed to welcome the British”.Refusing to let the discussion spiral into a Tagore-versus-Chattopadhyay debate, BJP’s IT cell chief Amit Malviya spoke in a detailed post on X about the wide acceptability of ‘Vande Mataram’ in Bengal. He wrote: “From its first publication in ‘Bangadarshan’, the literary journal Rishi Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay edited, on 7 Nov 1875; to its inclusion in ‘Anandamath’, published in 1882; to Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore’s rendition of the hymn at the Calcutta session of Congress in 1896; to the prabhat pheris that marked the uprising against Banga Bhanga (Partition of Bengal) in 1905; to Bhikaji Cama’s incorporation of the two magical words in the 1907 version of the Tricolour — ‘Vande Mataram’ became what Sri Aurobindo described as the ‘Mantra of Bharat’.““For countless freedom fighters of Bengal, from Khudiram Bose and Kanailal Dutta to the moderates, ‘Vande Mataram’ represented a shared obeisance to Bharat Mata. Matangini Hazra, who became the face of the rising tide of nationalist fervor, faced death at the hands of the British colonial police while chanting those two immortal words — ‘Vande Mataram’.”
