NewzVille Desk
Congress general secretary and Wayanad MP Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on Monday tore apart the Bharatiya Janata Party’s attempts to create a controversy on the national song ‘Vande Mataram’.
She also said that the debate on the 150th anniversary of the national song was aimed at the ensuing assembly elections in West Bengal as well as to divert the public attention from the pressing issues like unemployment and rising prices.
Speaking in the Lok Sabha during the debate on Vande Mataram, Vadra quoted the correspondence between Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose on the matter.
She also asserted that only the first two stanzas of the poem, written by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, were adopted as the national song by the Constituent Assembly. She pointed out that even the national anthem was also part of a bigger poem.
The Congress general secretary noted that by raising a question on the decision of the Constituent Assembly is not only an insult to the heroes and great leaders of our freedom movement, but also an insult to the entire Constituent Assembly and exposes an anti-constitutional mindset.
She asked whether those in power today have become so arrogant that they now consider themselves greater than eminent figures like Mahatma Gandhi, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, Dr. Ambedkar, and Dr. Rajendra Prasad?
Questioning the purpose of debating on Vande Mataram that has already been adopted as the national song, the Wayanad MP said the purpose was obvious as the BJP wanted to exploit it for the ensuing West Bengal assembly elections and divert attention from some serious issues including price rise, unemployment, reservation and problems faced by women. She mentioned that government also wanted to divert attention from PMO-related matters and names of some Union ministers appearing in the infamous Epstein files.
The senior Congress leader took a dig at Prime Minister Narendra Modi for avoiding mentioning the word ‘Congress’ while quoting about the 1896 session of the Indian National Congress.
She said while the PM did mention the 1896 session, he did not say it was the Congress session.
Putting up chronology of the first two stanzas of the poem being adopted as the national song, she said the leaders of the freedom movement and those framing the Constitution felt at that time that adding the additional four paras to the song could be interpreted in a communal manner.
She said when the first two stanzas of the poem were adopted as the national song, even Syama Prasad Mookerjee, the founder of the Jan Sangh, the BJP’s earlier avatar, did not have any problems with that.
She asserted that Vande Mataram is the voice of the soul of the nation. “Vande Mataram was dear and sacred to us and it will always remain sacred to us,” she said, while pointing out that since 1905, the national song is recited in each and every session of the Congress.
Referring to PM Modi’s earlier statement accusing the opposition leaders of insulting him, Ms Vadra dared him to fix a time for a special debate on the issue of Nehru’s faults and mistakes.
“Let us debate it once and for all and close the chapter, so that we can debate about the present and the future of the country,” Vadra said in her characteristic gentle, yet assertive tone.
She said the government does not want to debate about the country’s present and the future. She said the Prime Minister’s confidence had shaken and his policies were weakening the country. She said even within the government, there were murmurs in hushed tones that the power was being concentrated and over-centralised in just 1-2 hands.
