National, Not Merely Religious: An Appeal on Vande Mataram

Dear Shri Rahul Gandhi,

I am writing to you not as a political adversary, nor as someone claiming expertise on the complex history of Vande Mataram, but as an Indian citizen and an Advocate of the Supreme Court who has struggled, perhaps more than once, to reconcile some of the present arguments surrounding the song with the secular and pluralistic India in which I believe.

I respectfully request you to reconsider the Congress position of limiting the singing of Vande Mataram to its first two stanzas.

My request is not for a political concession to the BJP, nor is it an argument against the legitimate religious freedom of India's Muslims. It is, instead, an appeal to the Congress tradition itself to reconsider whether secularism is best served by asking the majority community to repeatedly withdraw, dilute or apologise for expressions that have acquired a deeply national rather than exclusively religious meaning.

Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb must mean reciprocity

I have always understood Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb to mean something much more beautiful than mere accommodation of one community by another.

It means a civilisation in which different traditions have lived together long enough to borrow from one another, influence one another and, eventually, become part of a common Indian cultural vocabulary.

It means that an Indian Muslim can appreciate the civilisational symbols of India's Hindu majority without becoming less Muslim, just as a Hindu can embrace Urdu poetry, Persian vocabulary, Islamic architecture, Inquilab Zindabad, Jai Hind, Sare Jahan Se Achha and innumerable other cultural contributions without becoming less Hindu or less Indian.

That is the genius of India.

But reciprocity is the essential word.

A culture of mutual accommodation cannot become a system in which the majority civilisation is expected to accommodate every objection raised in the name of minority sentiment, while the minority is never expected to reciprocate by accepting the cultural expressions of the majority.

That would not be Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb. It would be an asymmetrical arrangement.

And asymmetry, when institutionalised, eventually breeds resentment.

Secularism cannot mean selective restraint

Secularism is difficult precisely because it requires us to apply the same moral standard to ourselves that we apply to others.

Law does not ordinarily ask who is standing in the dock before deciding what the law means. Ethics cannot change merely because the person affected belongs to a different community.

Likewise, a genuinely secular society cannot say that one community's religious sensitivities must always be protected while the cultural and civilisational sensitivities of another community are automatically treated as majoritarianism.

There is a difference between protecting a person's freedom not to participate in a religious practice and asking society to abandon a shared national symbol because someone objects to its historical or religious imagery.

Article 25 of our Constitution protects freedom of conscience and religion. It does not create a hierarchy in which one citizen's religious sentiment is inherently superior to another citizen's cultural memory.

The proper secular response is mutual restraint and mutual respect not unilateral surrender.

The extraordinary Indian capacity to absorb cultural influences

India's nationalist vocabulary itself demonstrates how organically this civilisational exchange has occurred.

Inquilab Zindabad contains Arabic and Persian linguistic ancestry. Yet no serious Indian nationalist today treats it as an alien or sectarian slogan.

Why?

Because it was carried into the bloodstream of Indian nationalism by our revolutionaries.

Bhagat Singh, Batukeshwar Dutt and countless others transformed it from a linguistic expression into an Indian revolutionary cry.

Similarly, Jai Hind has linguistic and historical associations that are not exclusively Sanskritic. Yet it became sacred to generations of Indians because Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and the soldiers of the Indian National Army made it a national salutation.

The secular majority of India has never demanded that these expressions be purged because their linguistic ancestry is Arabic, Persian or otherwise non-Sanskritic.

Quite the opposite.

We accepted them because India accepted them.

We did not ask whether Inquilab was sufficiently Hindu before allowing Bhagat Singh to become our national memory.

We did not ask whether Jai Hind contained enough Sanskrit before allowing Netaji to become a symbol of Indian patriotism.

We accepted these expressions because the people who gave them their nationalist meaning gave them to India.

That is precisely the argument I would make for Vande Mataram.

Vande Mataram belongs to the history of sacrifice

The controversy surrounding the later stanzas of Vande Mataram is real and cannot simply be dismissed.

The song contains imagery drawn from Hindu religious and cultural traditions. That fact should neither be denied nor concealed.

But the question before us is not whether a Muslim citizen should be compelled to worship a Hindu deity.

The question is whether a national song which acquired its extraordinary political significance through the sacrifices of Indians during the freedom struggle should continue to be honoured as part of our common national inheritance.

Those are very different questions.

A person may refuse to worship a deity.

But that does not necessarily mean that the same person must reject a historical song because that deity appears within its poetic imagery.

Likewise, when an Indian sings Vande Mataram today in a national setting, it is entirely possible that he or she is saluting the motherland and remembering the men and women who fought under that cry not performing a religious act of worship.

Indeed, Mahatma Gandhi himself expressly described Vande Mataram as a political cry rather than a religious cry and argued that its opening lines were free from objection.

That distinction deserves to be remembered.

What happened in 1937 deserves historical context

The Congress decision in 1937 to limit public rendition to the first two stanzas arose in a very different political environment.

The Muslim League had increasingly sought to give communal dimensions to symbols and political questions, and objections were raised to the later portions of Vande Mataram because of their references to Hindu deities. The Congress Working Committee subsequently accepted the first two stanzas for public national occasions, following deliberations involving leaders including Rabindranath Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Chandra Bose and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad.

It is therefore fair to describe the 1937 decision as a political compromise intended to preserve communal harmony in the extraordinarily fragile circumstances of the time.

But a compromise made in 1937 need not become an eternal constitutional theology.

Circumstances change.

India changed profoundly in 1947.

Partition happened.

Pakistan was created.

India chose, deliberately and constitutionally, to remain a secular democracy.

That historical transformation matters.

What may have been a prudent piece of political firefighting in the 1930s should not automatically become a permanent principle that the majority must continue to dilute its civilisational expressions whenever an objection is raised.

Gandhiji's warning is remarkably relevant today

There is one observation of Mahatma Gandhi that I believe deserves particular consideration.

At his prayer meeting at Gauhati on 10 January 1946, Gandhi addressed the controversy surrounding national slogans and observed that cries such as Vande Mataram, Jai Bharat and Jai Hind had begun frightening some Muslims. He asked, in substance, whether “Bharat ki Jai” could possibly mean “Musalman ki Kshay” victory for India meaning destruction of Muslims and called it a matter of shame that matters had reached such a point.

And in that same period Gandhi defended the continuing place of Vande Mataram, with the warning that “Jai Hind should not replace Vande-mataram.” The recorded account of his 10 January 1946 speech notes his concern that if a nationalist symbol with such a history of sacrifice could simply be discarded because some objected to it, there was a danger that other national symbols could subsequently face the same fate.

I find this profoundly relevant.

The answer to communal apprehension, according to Gandhi, was not to make every Indian symbol progressively thinner until nobody could possibly object to it.

His answer was to educate Indians into understanding one another.

That is a very different conception of secularism.

We must not create a precedent of perpetual retreat

My concern is not that Muslims object to Vande Mataram.

Citizens are entitled to object to cultural expressions, and no person should be compelled to perform an act that genuinely violates his or her conscience.

My concern is the possibility of creating a political precedent whereby every objection from a religious group becomes sufficient reason for the larger society to retreat.

If that principle is accepted, where does it end?

Today it is Vande Mataram.

Tomorrow, will someone say that Raghupati Raghav Raja Ram cannot be sung because it invokes the name of Ram?

Will someone object to the imagery of Bharat Mata?

Will someone demand that references to Krishna, Shiva, Durga or other civilisational figures be excluded from public cultural life because they are religious?

If the answer to these questions is that every citizen must tolerate the existence of these cultural references while remaining free not to participate in their religious practice, then precisely the same principle should apply to Vande Mataram.

That is secularism.

The sacrifice of our freedom fighters cannot be retrospectively edited

There is another dimension which I find difficult to ignore.

Many of the men and women who fought for India's freedom sang Vande Mataram.

They did not sing it because a future Constitution had authorised it.

They sang it before India was free.

They sang it when the British Raj could punish them for doing so.

For many revolutionaries, the words were a source of courage.

To me, therefore, singing Vande Mataram is not primarily an act of reverence towards Durga or any other deity mentioned in its later verses.

It is an act of remembrance of those who stood before an empire and said that India was their motherland.

When we sing it today, we are remembering them.

That historical meaning cannot simply be erased because a later generation finds some of the poetic imagery religiously uncomfortable.

If anything, our secularism should be sufficiently confident to say:

You do not have to worship the deity. But you can still respect the sacrifice of the people who sang the song.

And conversely, the majority should be sufficiently confident to say:

Your refusal to worship our deity does not make you less Indian, and our remembrance of our martyrs does not make us less secular.

That is the mutual respect on which India must stand.

My own position is not born of prejudice

I would also like to make something personally clear because I do not wish this letter to be misunderstood.

I am not writing from any prejudice against Muslims.

Indeed, my own professional and public life should make that assumption difficult to sustain.

I have personally faced prosecution under the UAPA and what I consider to have been a false criminal case after speaking in support of Muslims in the context of the violence in Tripura in October 2021.

Along with fellow lawyers, I participated in documenting those events and was associated with the report “Muslim Lives Matter”, which recorded allegations of atrocities against members of the Muslim community.

I mention this not to seek sympathy or to establish moral credentials, but simply to make my position clear.

I believe unequivocally in the freedom of Muslims to practise their religion.

I believe equally in the freedom of Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, atheists and everyone else to live according to conscience.

I am myself an atheist, and I believe that humanity ultimately stands above every religious ideology.

That is precisely why I find it difficult to accept an argument that asks me, as an Indian, to treat somebody else's religious sensitivity as inherently more worthy of accommodation than my own civilisational memory.

Secularism must educate, not merely accommodate

A political party with the history of the Indian National Congress has a responsibility that is greater than simply reflecting the preferences of its supporters.

A representative listens to his constituency.

A leader sometimes has to educate it.

A representative follows the prevailing sentiment.

A leader sometimes tells his followers that their sentiment is understandable but their conclusion is wrong.

That is the difference between representation and leadership.

I therefore hope that you will not approach this question merely as another confrontation with the BJP.

There is a danger in allowing every national question to become a BJP-versus-Congress binary.

The BJP does not own Vande Mataram.

The RSS does not own Vande Mataram.

The Hindu Mahasabha does not own Vande Mataram.

Nor does any contemporary political party.

It belongs to the history of India's freedom struggle.

The same country that gave us Vande Mataram gave us Sare Jahan Se Achha.

The same freedom movement gave us Inquilab Zindabad.

The same struggle gave us Jai Hind.

The same civilisation produced Gandhi's Raghupati Raghav Raja Ram alongside countless Muslim freedom fighters who fought for India's independence.

This is not a contradiction.

This is India.

A final request

I therefore respectfully request you to reconsider the Congress position on Vande Mataram.

I am not asking Congress to compel any Indian citizen to worship a Hindu deity.

I am not asking Congress to deny Muslims their right to conscience.

I am not asking Congress to abandon secularism.

I am asking for the opposite.

I am asking Congress to articulate a more confident, reciprocal and genuinely secular understanding of Indian pluralism.

A secular India should be able to say to a Hindu:

Your civilisation is not something you have to apologise for.

And to a Muslim:

Your faith is not something you have to surrender.

And to both:

Neither of you has the right to demand that the other cease to exist culturally.

That, to me, is Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb.

It is not the disappearance of difference.

It is the mutual acceptance of difference.

It is not the majority permanently bending before the minority.

It is not the minority being asked to surrender its faith to the majority.

It is the extraordinary Indian proposition that we can inherit different civilisations and yet share one nation.

I am writing this letter in the hope that you will rise above the immediate political echo chamber and reconsider the question as a leader rather than merely as the representative of a political constituency.

I have tried, repeatedly, to understand the depth of the objection to Vande Mataram. I remain unable to understand why acknowledging the existence of two or three Hindu deities in a nationalist poem should necessarily be equated with demanding religious worship from a Muslim citizen.

I may be wrong.

I do not claim expertise.

But if the answer to my difficulty is simply that the sentiments of a section of Muslims must prevail over the historical sentiments attached to a national song, then I fear we are not practising secularism.

We are practising selective accommodation.

And selective accommodation, when it becomes one-directional, eventually ceases to be secularism and becomes performative politics.

India deserves better.

Our martyrs deserve better.

And, in my humble view, the Muslim citizens of India also deserve better—because they should not be politically reduced to a community whose every religious objection must be accommodated rather than a community confident enough to participate in the shared civilisational life of India.

The finest tribute to India's pluralism would therefore not be to make Vande Mataram less Indian.

It would be to make India large enough for a Muslim to hear it without fear, a Hindu to sing it without apology, and an atheist like me to honour it without believing in the deities mentioned in it.

That is the secular India I hope you will help build.

- Advocate Mukesh Kishor, Managing Partner at Audacious Law Network, is a Supreme Court lawyer championing human and labour rights with a strong focus on fair labour practices and safeguarding fundamental freedoms.

Disclaimer: This is the personal opinion of the author and does not reflect the views of The Mooknayak.