Vande Mataram row: Congress cites 1937 resolution, says PM ‘insulted’ Tagore

Stepping up its offensive in the ongoing Vande Mataram controversy, the Congress on Sunday accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of “insulting” not just the Congress Working Committee (CWC) of 1937 but also Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore — the very man whose counsel shaped the committee’s historic resolution on the national song.

The charge was led by Congress general secretary (communications) Jairam Ramesh, who said that the prime minister’s comments — suggesting that the dropping of certain stanzas from Vande Mataram in 1937 had “sowed the seeds of Partition” — betrayed both ignorance and ideological bias.

“That the Prime Minister has insulted the CWC as also Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore is shocking but not surprising,” Ramesh said on X. “The RSS had played no role in India’s freedom movement led by Mahatma Gandhi — perhaps that is why its acolytes find it difficult to understand the ideals of those who did.”

Ramesh shared excerpts from The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Volume 66, page 46), documenting how the Congress Working Committee — which included Gandhi, Nehru, Sardar Patel, Subhas Chandra Bose, Maulana Azad, Rajendra Prasad, Sarojini Naidu, and others — deliberated on the cultural and emotional significance of Vande Mataram.

The CWC, he pointed out, had issued its resolution between 26 October and 1 November 1937, in Kolkata, after consulting Tagore, whose nuanced view led to the adoption of only the first two stanzas of the song — verses celebrating the beauty and abundance of the motherland, free of sectarian or theological imagery.

“The first two stanzas describe in tender language the beauty of the motherland and the abundance of her gifts,” the CWC statement read. “There is nothing in them to which anyone can take exception. The other stanzas, however, contain religious allusions which may not align with the beliefs of all communities.”

Tagore’s guidance, Ramesh noted, was both poetic and principled. In a letter to Jawaharlal Nehru, the poet wrote: “The spirit of tenderness and devotion expressed in its first portion... made a special appeal, so much so that I found no difficulty in dissociating it from the rest of the poem... with all the sentiments of which I could have no sympathy.”

To preserve national unity and inclusivity, the CWC — under Gandhi’s leadership — resolved that only the first two stanzas should be sung at national gatherings, and appointed a sub-committee including Nehru, Bose, Azad, and Narendra Dev to curate other patriotic songs in simple Hindustani. Tagore’s advice, the resolution said, was to be sought again in that process.

Prime Minister Modi, while inaugurating the 150th-anniversary celebrations of Vande Mataram on Friday, had claimed that omitting the later stanzas in 1937 “sowed the seeds of Partition” — remarks the Congress said were “deeply offensive” and “historically illiterate”.

“The Master Distortionist of a PM owes an apology,” Ramesh posted, sharing archival pages from Rabindra-Jeebanee, a Bengali biography of Tagore published by Visva-Bharati in 1994. “He has insulted our founding fathers — and most of all, Tagore himself.”

The Congress also accused the prime minister of deflecting from the nation’s current challenges. “Modi ji should fight his political battles on present issues that matter to crores of Indians — unemployment, inequality, inflation, and the collapse of foreign policy — instead of abusing Nehru and rewriting history,” Ramesh said.

In 1937, the CWC’s decision to use only the first two stanzas of Vande Mataram was hailed as an act of cultural sensitivity and national unity. The verses by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay — invoking the land as mother, draped in green and gold — became a unifying hymn of the freedom struggle.

“By distorting that history,” Ramesh said, “Modi has not only maligned the legacy of Gandhi, Nehru, and Tagore, but also betrayed a profound misunderstanding of the moral fabric that held the freedom movement together.”

With PTI inputs