“Vande Mataram and the Politics of Appeasement: Is Congress Repeating the Khilafat Mistake of 1919?”, MyIndMakers, Aug 24, 2026.
“When a political party chooses to sing only a truncated version of the National Song because a section once objected to its civilisational imagery, the question is not merely about protocol. It is about whether the politics of appeasement is once again being placed above the cultural memory of Bharat’s freedom struggle.
The latest controversy over Vande Mataram is therefore much larger than a dispute over two stanzas.
At a Congress event in Goa attended by party president Mallikarjun Kharge, party workers reportedly sang only the first two stanzas of Vande Mataram. The episode came soon after the Congress Working Committee reaffirmed its 1937 position that only the first two stanzas would be sung at party functions. Union Home Minister Amit Shah has described the decision as an expression of the Congress’s “extreme policy of appeasement” and argued that the historical truncation of the song was an insult to Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and the freedom fighters who drew inspiration from it.
Congress may call this a reaffirmation of a historical resolution. But history itself raises an uncomfortable question:
Is this similar to supporting the Khilafat movement in 1919—when the Congress leadership allowed a particular religious-political demand to become part of the larger nationalist strategy in the hope of securing political unity?……………………….”
Read the full article at MyIndMakers.
