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”?

In fact, the example of Bangladesh knocks the bottom out of the anti-Vande Mataram campaign, which, unfortunately, prompted even the Congress president and the Prime Minister to distance themselves from a decision of their own government — namely, to celebrate the centenary of the national song on September 7.

Bangladesh’s 1972 Constitution directs the first 10 lines of Amar Shonar Bangla to be sung as the national anthem, which is written by none other than the author of India’s national anthem —Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore!

Like Vande Mataram, it too is replete with beautiful imagery of a bountiful mother. However, in recent years, some Muslim fundamentalists in Bangladesh have demanded changing of the national anthem. Why? Because “Bangladesh, a Muslim nation, cannot have a national anthem written by a Hindu and an Indian.”

(Read an excellent article on this subject by Dina Siddiqui in Himal: http://www.himalmag.com)

But the real lesson for our Marxists and Islamists comes from another little-known aspect of Amar Shonar Bangla. What was accepted by Bangladesh as its national anthem is not the whole original song composed by Tagore, but only an extract from it. Siddiqui writes: “The longer version appears to function as both paean and pledge of allegiance to an embattled motherland that is also the Mother Goddess.”

It goes: “Oh Mother, I offer at your feet this my lowered head. Give me, O Mother, the dust of your feet, to be the jewel upon my head. O Mother, whatever wealth this poor man has, I place before your feet.”

Siddiqui adds: “Bangladesh’s national anthem eliminates these ‘awkward’ passages. Indeed, the only Islamic influence on the text is that which is invisible; what makes this text ‘appropriate’ for Bangladesh is the erasure of those parts that are potentially offensive by their explicit Hindu tone. The remainder of the song is perfectly consistent with a strong nationalist movement. The reference to the nation as mother is also stripped of its religious character. It is only when Tagore, India and Hindu are conflated that problems emerge.”

So, a ‘Muslim’ Bangladesh can accept Tagore’s abridged song as its national anthem, and all Bangladeshis, except the fundamentalists, have no hesitation in singing it. However, in secular India, our communists,

Congressmen and misguided Muslim brethren will not sing Bankim’s Vande Mataram, even though it, too, for identical reasons, has been abridged, stripped of its “religious character”, and made appropriate for Indians of all faiths.

In Bangladesh, secular Muslims are horrified at fundamentalist Muslims’ attempt to conflate “Tagore, India and Hindu”. But in India, our own ultra-secularists have no qualms about conflating “Bankim, Hindu and BJP”. What hypocrisy! Also, how dangerous!

For if we accept the communist-Islamist calumny against Vande Mataram, their logic leads us to the inevitable conclusion that they are actually endorsing the Muslim fundamentalists’ outcry in Bangladesh to change its national anthem, because it evokes an “anthropomorphic depiction” of their nation; and because — this is the sin above all sins — the stanzas already excised from it allude to motherland as a Hindu goddess.

As for the Leftists’ claim that the “the national ethos” of post-1947 India should be “only civic and territorial in nature”, and that it must have no cultural underpinnings and overtones — because that would make cultural nationalism as the basis of India’s nationhood — its sheer inanity is mind-boggling. By this logic, our Motherland would be reduced to a mere civic entity, cleansed of all its rich cultural-spiritual ecology, and the Republic of India, with its proud legacy of a living civilization that is over 5,000 years old, will have to be replaced by the Municipal Corporation of India. But more about it next week.