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.

... contd.