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There is an anecdote worth beginning with, because it captures something the current controversy has buried. Oscar Fernandes was a top organisational leader of the Congress for nearly four decades, a man who quietly nurtured generations of young Congressmen and women. Often, when a student or youth leader approached him for a post in the party, he would ask them to do one thing first: recite Vande Mataram. For him the national song and the core of Congress ideology were a single continuum. One could not aspire to a party position without first feeling the national song in one’s chest.

Hold that image against the noise of the present moment. A party that recites Vande Mataram at its conventions, a party that has adopted it as the national song, a party that has ensured that every session of parliament and the state assemblies closes with it, is today being labelled anti-Vande Mataram. Irony, one is tempted to say, dies a thousand deaths.

The two standard stanzas of Vande Mataram were decided upon by Congress leaders in 1937. Among them were Mahatma Gandhi, Subhas Chandra Bose, and Sardar Patel. Also in the group was Rabindranath Tagore.

The timing matters. 1937 was the very year the Congress swept the pre-independence provincial elections while the Muslim League was routed, failing to dominate even the Muslim-majority provinces. This was the period historians refer to as the parting of ways, when after two decades of friction the final showdown between the Congress and the Muslim League had begun. The men who trimmed Vande Mataram to two stanzas were not surrendering to the League but fighting it in philosophy, programme and politics, and winning.

Today the nationalism of those very Congress leaders, the men who led the independence movement and who fought the Muslim League, is being questioned by a party whose ideological parivar (family), the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Hindu Mahasabha, sided with the British during the Quit India Movement and partnered with Muslim League.

After the 1937 elections, in those same years when Congress was fighting Muslim League, the Hindu Mahasabha, led by Savarkar, was an alliance partner of the Muslim League in coalition governments in three provinces: Sind, the North-West Frontier Province and Bengal.

The present BJP leaders, heirs to the pro-British record of the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha, now........

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