New Delhi: Preventing the singing of Vande Mataram, or disrupting a gathering engaged in it, could soon invite a jail term of up to three years — the same penalty that has shielded the National Anthem since 1971—with the Centre moving in the Rajya Sabha to write the National Song into the criminal law for the first time. In the process, the Narendra Modi government is reopening an argument over the song that is older than the Republic itself.
The Prevention of Insults to National Honour (Amendment) Bill, 2026, piloted by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs, seeks to amend Section 3 of the 1971 Act of the same name, which at present penalises the intentional prevention of the singing of the National Anthem, or the causing of disturbance to any assembly engaged in it. The bill will come up for discussion in Rajya Sabha Monday.
The amendment intends to split the offence into two clauses and extend both to the National Song, leaving the punishment and the qualifying word “intentionally” untouched. The 1971 Act separately covers insults to the National Flag and the Constitution.
The Bill was introduced in the Rajya Sabha Friday, but could not be debated as the House proceedings were stalled amid uproar by the Opposition over the NEET-UG paper leak issue. Communist Party of India (Marxist) MP John Brittas had earlier moved a notice under Rule 67 opposing it. The Monsoon Session is scheduled to run till 13 August.
In its Statement of Objects and Reasons, the government has justified the amendment by pointing to a proceeding of the Constituent Assembly. On 24 January, 1950, its president Rajendra Prasad had stated that Vande Mataram—composed by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay—which had played a historic role in the freedom struggle, would be honoured equally with Jana Gana Mana and have a status equal to it. That statement conferred parity of honour, but the two were never placed on an equal footing in law, and the National Song has remained outside the 1971 Act for 55 years, the note says.
The Union Cabinet had cleared the proposal in May, days after the conclusion of a year-long official commemoration of 150 years of the song. It is the latest in a series of steps the Centre has taken with respect to Vande Mataram over the past year. Previous moves include a home ministry circular in January laying down a protocol for its rendition, instructions of 6 February fixing the full six-stanza version for a listed set of state occasions and directing that the National Song precede the Anthem wherever both are performed, and a 9 July letter to chief secretaries seeking compliance across states.
The 77th Republic Day parade this January was also themed on 150 years of the song, with a Ministry of Culture tableau carrying a replica of Chattopadhyay’s manuscript, besides massed bands at Beating Retreat spelling out “Vande Mataram” in formation.
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Already in the courts
The rendition protocol has already been challenged in court, with mixed results.
In March, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court—headed by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, and comprising Justices Joymalya Bagchi and Vipul Pancholi—heard a petition by Muhammed Sayeed Noori against the home ministry circular and the requirement that all six stanzas be sung. Declining to interfere, Justice Bagchi observed that the circular was in the nature of an “advisory”. The bench held that the petitioner’s apprehensions were premature, and since no penalty was prescribed for not following it, it could not be read as a binding compulsion.
The Bill now before Parliament would supply the very element the court found missing—a punishment.
A separate PIL against the same protocol, filed in the Calcutta High Court by senior advocate and CPI(M) MP Bikas Ranjan Bhattacharya, is pending, with the bench having asked him to first establish its admissibility.
The most direct confrontation has been in West Bengal, where the new Bharatiya Janata Party government, within days of taking charge, directed through its Directorate of Madrasah Education that Vande Mataram be sung at the morning assembly in government, government-aided and recognised unaided madrasas. The Calcutta High Court stayed the order, observing prima facie that the singing of the song could not be made compulsory.
Earlier judicial pronouncements have gone both ways. In Bijoe Emmanuel vs State of Kerala (1986), the Supreme Court held that three Jehovah’s Witness children expelled for declining to sing the National Anthem had been wrongly treated, upholding their freedom of conscience. In 2017, a bench headed by Justice Dipak Misra declined a plea by lawyer Ashwini Upadhyay seeking a national policy to promote Vande Mataram, holding that Article 51A(a) of the Constitution refers only to the National Flag and the National Anthem and that there was “no concept of a National Song” in law.
A 150-year-old faultline
The dispute the Bill steps into is nearly as old as the song. Chattopadhyay wrote Vande Mataram in the mid-1870s—the government dates it to 7 November, 1875—and later wove it into his 1882 novel Anandamath. Tagore set it to music and sang it at the 1896 session of the Congress. It then became the rallying cry of the Swadeshi movement after the partition of Bengal in 1905, with the colonial administration treating its public rendition as seditious.
While the opening stanzas describe the land, the later ones invoke the motherland as the goddesses Durga and Lakshmi—verses that sections of the Muslim leadership held to be at odds with the doctrine of monotheism.
The objection surfaced in the open at the 1923 Kakinada session of the Congress, whose president Muhammad Ali Jauhar protested when the singer Vishnu Digambar Paluskar rose to render it, and was formally settled at a Congress Working Committee meeting in Calcutta in October 1937, attended by Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, Subhas Chandra Bose, Prasad and Maulana Azad. Ahead of the meeting, Tagore had written to Nehru suggesting that only the first two stanzas be used, and the resolution of 28 October confined ceremonial use to those stanzas.
It is that 1937 decision that the ruling party has returned to repeatedly. Opening the 150th-anniversary commemoration on 7 November, 2025, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that the fragmentation of the song had “sowed the seeds of Partition”, a charge he pressed again during 10-hour special discussions held in both Houses that December.
Rajya Sabha Leader of the Opposition Mallikarjun Kharge countered that Congress workers had gone to jail chanting the song during the non-cooperation movement, and MP Jairam Ramesh cited Tagore’s letter to argue that the government had ended up insulting Tagore. Trinamool Congress members protested silently in the Central Hall with portraits of Chattopadhyay and Tagore, while Priyanka Gandhi Vadra linked the timing to the West Bengal election.
The BJP went on to win that election, and Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari, sworn in on 9 May, issued the madrasa order within days. The All India Muslim Personal Law Board sought its withdrawal on 2 June, invoking Articles 19, 25 and 28(3) of the Constitution, and at its executive meeting on 22 June resolved to move court, should Parliament make the song compulsory for citizens or students—a stand echoed by the Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind and the Jamaat-e-Islami.
However, reactions to the Bill have not divided neatly along party lines.
Janata Dal(United) MLA Shyam Rajak backed it, saying that any obstruction of the song was “an insult to the nation”, while Uttar Pradesh Leader of the Opposition Mata Prasad Pandey said Vande Mataram should not be opposed, but should not be raised to the status of the National Anthem.
Shiv Sena (UBT) MP Sanjay Raut challenged Modi and Shah to recite the song without a teleprompter, and the Congress has described the Bill as of a piece with the government’s tendency to legislate through the threat of imprisonment.
(Edited by Mannat Chugh)
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