On Monday, December 8, Parliament will take up a discussion on the national song ‘Vande Mataram’ to commemorate the hymn’s sesquicentennial (150th) anniversary. The government is keen on holding a dedicated debate on the song of freedom struggle, composed by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee in 1875, to highlight its cultural, historical, and national significance.

The debate also has a political dimension. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to initiate the discussion, and ruling party leaders have previously complained that the Congress party’s 1937 decision to adopt only the first two stanzas of the song sowed the seeds of Partition.

This commemorative debate provides a platform for the ruling party to articulate its cultural and nationalistic agenda and engage with the long-standing political discourse surrounding the song’s historical adoption and current status. While the Congress may come out with its own justification for deleting the stanzas from the song in 1937, it’s also an opportunity for it to correct a historical wrong.

It remains a fact that Chatterjee’s hymn was the uniting lyric of our freedom struggle. The fact that ‘Vande Mataram’ was a powerful tool employed by freedom fighters to stir the nation against British imperialism has been accepted by historians, knowingly or inadvertently, across all hues and strands.

‘Modern India’, authored by Bipan Chandra for the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), which then had on the editorial board prominent names from the non-saffron strand like S Gopal, S Nurul Hasan, Satish Chandra, and Romila Thapar as members, mentions that “the partition (of Bengal) took effect on 16 October 1905. The leaders of the........

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