What have some of our leftist thinkers said about India’s nationhood in their current diatribe against our national song? According to them, Vande Mataram, even in its abridged version, “evokes the anthropomorphic depiction —Bharat Mata, with its allusions to Durga — of the Indian nation, which is more suited to a context of cultural nationalism.”

As they tell us, “the makers of modern India” believed that “the national ethos that would power the new nation would be only civic and territorial in nature.” It was therefore “clear that symbols such as Vande Mataram that had strong overtones of cultural nationalism could not have a place among the official symbols of India’s nationhood.” In last column I referred to Malini Parthasarathy’s article in The Hindu of September 6, which typifies the argument in many Marxist writings on Vande Mataram.

Look at the nonsense that pervades each of these formulations. And some falsehood, too. After all, it is the same makers of modern India who chose Jana Gana Mana as the national anthem who also chose Vande Mataram (only the first two stanzas) as a national song, and enshrined both as “official symbols of India’s nationhood.”

Second lie: there are no allusions to Durga in the first two stanzas. Yet, both Marxists and Islamists incessantly spread this lie so that they can project Vande Mataram as a “Hindu song”, a “BJP song”, and not a national song.

If they have ideological objection to the “anthropomorphic depiction” of the Indian nation as Mother India, will our communist friends in India explain why, when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in the middle of World War II, they felt that it was their duty support the “Socialist Fatherland”? And why did even Stalin project the Soviet Union as a “Fatherland”, if not to harness people’s feelings of patriotism rooted in their shared cultural heritage and psychological bonds? Similarly, don’t the Muslims of Turkey and Bangladesh, for example, respectfully accept their countries as “Fatherland” and “Motherland”?

... contd.