In a recent opinion piece in ThePrint, Ibn Khaldun Bharati seeks to explain the long-standing Muslim objections to ‘Vande Mataram’, framing them not as matters of faith or conscience but as evidence of a deeper rejection of Indian nationhood. He suggests that critics of the song—largely Muslims—are animated by separatist impulses, masked behind theological reasoning, and rooted in a historical elitism, allegedly inherited from “invader” ancestors.
Presented as a meditation on history and semantics, the argument ultimately advances a reductive and polarising narrative—one that risks reinforcing communal suspicion rather than illuminating India’s pluralist compact. Bharati’s core claim—that Muslim resistance to ‘Vande Mataram’ reflects an unwillingness to merge into an “organic whole” with Hindus—ignores both historical context and the legitimate religious concerns involved, while homogenising a diverse community into a permanent category of doubt. This framing deserves correction.
Faith is not obfuscation
Bharati dismisses Muslim objections as “beyond comprehension”, couched in “abstruse theological terms” that even educated Muslims allegedly fail to understand. This is a patronising simplification. The objection is neither obscure nor manufactured; it rests squarely on tawhid, Islam’s foundational belief in the absolute oneness of God, which proscribes any act resembling shirk—the association of divinity with created forms.
The lyrics of ‘Vande Mataram’, embedded in Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s 1882 novel Anandamath, go well beyond geographic or emotional attachment to land. Its later stanzas personify the nation as a divine mother figure, explicitly invoking imagery associated with Durga and Lakshmi. For many Muslims, saluting (vande) such a figure crosses a doctrinal line. This concern was articulated clearly by leaders like Muhammad Ali Jinnah as early as 1937 and debated extensively within the All-India Muslim League.
The objection sharpened not in 1896, when the song was sung at Congress sessions, but after the 1937 provincial elections, when Congress ministries made the song compulsory in schools and official functions. To ridicule this as defying “common sense” is to misunderstand pluralism itself, which rests on respecting religious limits, not deriding them.
Pluralism cannot be enforced
Bharati also argues that emphasising Islam’s opposition to idol worship undermines diversity and peaceful coexistence—values in which Muslims are said to have a “greater stake.” This logic inverts the meaning of pluralism. An inclusive society does not compel participation in symbols that violate conscience; it allows space for principled abstention.
Compulsory patriotism—whether around ‘Vande Mataram’ or any other symbol—has historically alienated minorities rather than integrated them. That many Muslims have expressed deep patriotism through other cultural forms, including AR Rahman’s ‘Maa Tujhe Salaam’, undermines the claim that dissent here signals disloyalty. The insinuation that Muslims must constantly demonstrate a “greater stake” in India subtly casts them as probationary citizens—an idea corrosive to democratic belonging.
Distorting Mahmood Madani
The article’s portrayal of Islamic scholar Mahmood Madani’s recent speech is exaggerated. Bharati presents Madani’s remarks as a ferocious invocation of “jihad” against the revival of ‘Vande Mataram’. In reality, speaking in Bhopal in November 2025, Madani explicitly clarified that jihad denotes a moral and spiritual struggle against injustice—not violence or war.
Madani’s remarks were directed at cultural imposition: “Dead communities don’t face any difficulty since they surrender readily. When asked to chant Vande Mataram, they willingly do that.” This was not a call to arms but a warning against the erosion of religious conscience. Madani repeatedly stressed that no one should be compelled to recite the song. His subsequent clarifications to ANI and The Economic Times, reiterating the non-violent meaning of jihad within Indian democracy, are conspicuously absent from Bharati’s account. Sensationalism here substitutes for accuracy.
Context, not semantics alone
Bharati points to Bihar Governor Arif Mohammed Khan’s Urdu rendering of the first two stanzas—approved by Nadwatul Ulama—as proof that objections are politically motivated. This inference ignores context. The ulema’s approval concerned a decontextualised text, detached from Anandamath and its ideological load.
The novel portrays a Hindu ascetic rebellion against Muslim rulers in 18th-century Bengal, casting Muslims as oppressive outsiders and invoking vows to eradicate “Muslim tyranny.” Scholars writing in Eurasia Review, JSTOR-indexed journals, and other academic forums have long noted Anandamath’s role in shaping an exclusionary Hindu nationalist imagination. Khan’s exercise does not negate this history; it underscores that objections arise from the song’s narrative and symbolic associations, not merely from vocabulary.
Selective history and sweeping claims
Bharati’s semantic analysis of vande and mataram, alongside Quranic references and examples of Muslim nationalisms elsewhere, tells only part of the story. While the idea of a motherland is not alien to Islam, the complete text of ‘Vande Mataram’ explicitly equates the nation with Hindu deities. Even Muhammad Iqbal’s early patriotic poetry—invoked approvingly—belongs to a phase he later moved beyond, rejecting religious syncretism.
Equally untenable is the assertion that Muslims exhibit nationalism only where they are a majority. India’s history offers ample counterexamples, from Maulana Abul Kalam Azad’s unwavering commitment to composite nationalism to the everyday patriotism of millions of Indian Muslims who sing the national anthem without hesitation.
Inflammatory assumptions
Most troubling is the claim that Muslim resistance flows from elitist descendants of “invaders” who view India as vanquished territory. This is historically inaccurate and needlessly provocative. Opposition to the song crystallised around fears of majoritarian overreach in 1937, not civilisational contempt.
Bharati’s attempt to recast Anandamath as a class struggle against oppressors also falters. The novel’s antagonists are Muslims not merely as rulers but as a religious community—a point acknowledged even by sympathetic critics. Analogies with Marxist interpretations of the Moplah rebellion obscure the text’s explicit communal framing.
Accommodation is not appeasement
The lament over the Congress Working Committee’s 1937 decision to limit official use of ‘Vande Mataram’ to its first two stanzas—portrayed as appeasement leading to Partition—echoes contemporary political rhetoric rather than historical evidence. Jawaharlal Nehru and his colleagues acted on Rabindranath Tagore’s own caution that the full song risked division. Partition was the product of structural forces—colonial policies, economic inequalities, political breakdowns—not the truncation of a song.
Also read: Congress wasted a chance to turn the tables on BJP over Vande Mataram. It chose appeasement
Unity without coercion
Finally, Bharati’s suggestion that Muslims are now embracing national symbols due to a “conducive atmosphere” since 2014 implies that pressure yields patriotism. This view overlooks the long-standing contributions of Muslims across India’s civic, cultural, and military life. Unity forged through compulsion is brittle; unity sustained through dialogue endures.
For all its rhetorical flourish, Bharati’s argument ultimately casts Muslims as permanent outsiders, their dissent read as a deficiency. India’s constitutional strength lies precisely in its refusal to equate uniformity with unity. A confident nation does not demand identical gestures of belonging; it accommodates difference without suspicion. To insist otherwise is to risk reproducing the exclusions we claim to have transcended.
Hasnain Naqvi is a former member of the history faculty at St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. Views are personal.
Ibn Khaldun Bharati’s response:
Hasnain Naqvi has a knack for restating my arguments in the garb of a rejoinder.
My contention in this article has been that it was the separatist streak in the Muslim politics that led them to conjure a theological objection to ‘Vande Mataram’. Naqvi says that it was the religious compulsion that made them oppose the national song, and seek a separatist path. He is going a step further than me, and I don’t mind it. His entire argument is an advocacy of the kind of pluralism which, in the context of this subject, was earlier known as the Two-Nation theory, and nowadays as Identity politics.
To contest my point about Arif Mohammed Khan’s translation of the song, he confirms my contention that the opposition to the song was not because of its words and their obvious meaning, but because it represented the awakening of the national spirit — the Idea of India.
He is also economical with the truth about the historical meaning of jihad as military action, and obfuscates the connection that Maulana Mahmood Madani made between the “imposition” of ‘Vande Mataram’ and the inevitability of jihad.
With this, ThePrint closes the discussion.