The government’s recent adoption of the full, six-stanza version of Vande Mataram should be quashed as unconstitutional since it marks an attempt to turn India from a “secular republic” into a “theocracy”, a petitioner has told the Supreme Court.
Balakrishnan Sathyabhama Mavoji, a retired Dalit IAS officer from Keralam, has argued that Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s novel Anandamath, which features all six stanzas of Vande Mataram, is “filled with violent and hateful invective against Muslims”. His petition will be heard on October 27.
Mavoji’s plea highlights that Anandamath portrays a religious war waged by Hindu sanyasis against Muslims.
“The unstated but undeniable consequence of the impugned orders would be to irreversibly deepen communal division and conflict in India by outraging the religious and spiritual feelings of minority religions; promote enmity and conflict between different communities by advancing the supremacy of dominant communities; and to promote enmity between Hindus and Muslims such that the unity, solidarity, harmony of our country as a whole is irreversibly mutilated,” Mavoji’s petition says.
“The impugned orders are a direct attack against the foundational Constitutional basic structure features of fraternity and secularism.”
Last month, the apex court had sought the Centre’s response on a petition from musician T.M. Krishna challenging the government circular requiring the rendition of all six stanzas of Vande Mataram at official events and school assemblies, and the legal amendment giving the song the same status as the national anthem, Jana Gana Mana.
According to the secular consensus, the first two stanzas of Vande Mataram, which predate Anandamath by several years, are an unproblematic paean to the natural beauty of India. The remaining four stanzas are problematic since they carry Hindu motifs such as the names of goddesses.
In 1937, a Congress committee decided to have only the first two stanzas sung at public events on the advice of Rabindranath Tagore. Later, the government of independent India adopted the first two stanzas as the national song.
The ruling BJP, which reveres Anandamath in keeping with its Sangh Parivar ideology, had a debate conducted in Parliament on Vande Mataram last December as part of the song’s 150-year celebrations and slammed its “truncation” as an instance of “Muslim appeasement”.
The Narendra Modi government now refers to all the six stanzas as the national song, and has made its full rendition mandatory — before the singing or playing of the national anthem — at government and school events.
According to Mavoji’s petition, drawn and filed through advocate G. Mohan Gopal and advocate-on-record Vaibhav Choudhary, the central idea of Anandamath is that the country is a “Vaishnavite-Saktheya Goddess” and that patriotism consists in worshipping her. And, the petition argues, the six-stanza poem is an integral part of the novel.
It says the government’s recent moves are an effort “to convert the foundational concept of India as a socialist, secular, democratic republic into (a concept of India as) a divine sectarian theistic Vaishnavite-Saktheya Goddess with worship being offered to these Goddesses”.
“By imposing (a) sectarian prayer to particular Goddesses of one particular religion as the National Song of India, the impugned orders convert the character of the polity of India from a ‘secular republic’ to a ‘theocracy’,” the petition argues.
“Under Article 21 of the Constitution, the petitioner has the fundamental right to live in a polity in which the State is secular and does not establish a state religion or promote any particular religion in its actions and institutions.”