(UCA News) — India can honor a national song without asking every citizen to surrender conscience in order to prove patriotism. In a country shaped by Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Jewish traditions — and by atheists and agnostics too — that distinction is the difference between shared citizenship and majoritarian pressure.

On Nov. 7, 2025, the prime minister inaugurated a year-long commemoration of the 150th anniversary of Vande Mataram at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi Indoor Stadium. A commemorative stamp and coin were unveiled, while schools, government offices, army cantonments and district headquarters joined performances of a song that helped give emotional language to India’s freedom struggle.

The commemoration was legitimate. The coercive possibility surrounding it is not.

Parliament’s 2026 amendment to the Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act extends criminal protection to the National Song. It provides for imprisonment of up to three years, a fine, or both, for intentionally preventing its singing or causing disturbance to an assembly engaged in singing it. The law does not expressly say that every citizen must sing Vande Mataram. That distinction matters. Yet when criminal law is combined with official directions prescribing all six stanzas, it creates an atmosphere in which peaceful refusal may be treated with suspicion.

The question is not whether India may celebrate Vande Mataram. Of course it may. The question is whether the state should turn a song into a test of religious loyalty.

A nation of many consciences

Vande Mataram began as a poem and was later incorporated into Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Anandamath. Its first two stanzas speak in broadly patriotic language. The later stanzas invoke Durga, Lakshmi and Saraswati explicitly. For many Indians, those words express the sacred beauty of the motherland. For others, including some Muslims, Christians and non-believers, reciting them may conflict with their understanding of........

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