Congress general secretary K C Venugopal said on Tuesday that allies should “honour the wisdom and judgment” of the freedom movement leaders who had supported limiting public rendition of the song to its opening two stanzas. His intervention followed Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah and National Conference president Farooq Abdullah standing through all six stanzas at the inaugural International Film Festival in Srinagar.
Venugopal said the full version of Vande Mataram sat “uneasily” with the syncretic and pluralist ethos envisaged by the freedom fighters. He said the Congress continued to regard the position associated with Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, Subhas Chandra Bose, Rajendra Prasad, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Sarojini Naidu and others, shaped partly by Rabindranath Tagore’s counsel, as decisive.
“With respect and humility, we would like our allies to honour the wisdom and judgment of our freedom fighters, and stand with us in singing only the version of this beautiful and historic song that they adopted,” Venugopal said. He argued that the two-stanza version had been chosen deliberately to prevent the song from becoming a source of communal division.
The National Conference has not announced a change in its alliance with the Congress over the issue. The two parties remain partners in the INDIA bloc at the national level, although their positions on the rendition have now diverged publicly. The Srinagar event was an official function, while the Congress’s formal position concerns the version it uses at party programmes.
The Congress Working Committee last month reaffirmed its adherence to a 1937 resolution under which only the first two stanzas were to be sung at Congress and national gatherings. That resolution acknowledged the role of Vande Mataram in the freedom movement but also accepted objections to religious imagery in later stanzas and treated the opening verses as sufficient for common public use.
The disagreement emerged weeks after the Congress headquarters saw controversy when the full six-stanza rendition was played during Independence Day celebrations. The party restated its 1937 position through the Working Committee. BJP leaders seized on that decision, while Congress officials argued that patriotism could not be measured by the number of stanzas sung and that the party was preserving a historically settled accommodation intended to respect India’s diversity.
The dispute has acquired sharper political significance since the Union government issued guidelines in January recognising a six-stanza version for official use. Akashvani began broadcasting the full version from March, replacing the shorter rendition traditionally aired after its signature tune. The six-stanza recording lasts about three minutes and 10 seconds.
The BJP has repeatedly attacked the Congress over its refusal to adopt the full rendition. Union Home Minister Amit Shah has accused the party of appeasement politics and argued that limiting the song amounted to disrespecting its author, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, and the freedom fighters who embraced it. Congress leaders have rejected that charge and said their position follows a decision taken during the independence movement.
Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge has also defended the two-stanza practice, saying the same version was sung by leaders including Gandhi, Nehru and Patel. Party leaders maintain that their policy applies to Congress programmes and does not amount to opposing the national song.
Vande Mataram was composed by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay in Sanskritised Bengali and later appeared in his novel Anandamath. The song became closely associated with the anti-colonial movement, particularly during the Swadeshi agitation, but its later verses drew objections from some Muslim leaders because of religious imagery.
