The recent heated debate between political parties over the 150-year-old nationalist song Vande Mataram is a telling example of the growing disconnect between them and grassroots politics in the country. The hullabaloo raised by the BJP in Parliament, amplified by a compliant mainstream media on the eve of state assembly polls in West Bengal, is clearly linked to the ruling party’s bid to bolster its flagging Hindu nationalism plank there.

However, the fight between the BJP and the Opposition about the long-forgotten controversy over a few stanzas of the song is quite irrelevant to an overwhelming majority of people in West Bengal.

There is more than a touch of irony about the fuss created about Vande Mataram and literary stalwart Bankim Chandra Chatterjee as an electoral issue in a state where both the song and the writer have virtually no resonance except perhaps among five per cent of voters, mostly middle-aged and elderly college-educated upper-caste middle class Bengalis living in Kolkata and some major district towns.

It underlines the BJP’s desperate bid to scrape the barrel for an electoral issue that will strike a chord with the local populace to counter its antagonist Trinamool Congress’s persistent campaign to paint it as an outside, non-Bengali occupation force.

Quite apart from the BJP’s clumsy, fumbling attempts in Parliament to resurrect Chatterjee as a Hindu nationalist, the entire exercise seems quite pointless since even if it were to win the debate with the Opposition, it would make little difference to voters in West Bengal.

The bunkum (excuse the pun) nature of the........

© Free Press Journal