Congress accuses PM Modi of distorting history, insulting founding fathers

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The Congress on Saturday accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of "distorting" history and insulting India's founding fathers, including Rabindranath Tagore, while demanding an apology from him after he slammed the opposition party over the dropping of stanzas from "Vande Mataram" in 1937.

Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh shared pages of Tagore's biography in Bengali, where he suggested that the first two stanzas of "Vande Mataram" be adopted as the national song.

"Here are pages 110-112 from vol 4 of the authoritative biography in Bengali of Rabindranath Tagore titled Rabindra-Jeebanee by Prabhat Kumar Mukhopadhyay, published by Visva-Bharati in 1994," Ramesh said in a post on X, while sharing the pages.

"The Master Distorian of a PM must render an apology. He has insulted our founding fathers and most of all Tagore himself," he added.

In an apparent attack on the Congress, the prime minister recently said important stanzas of "Vande Mataram" were dropped in 1937, which sowed the seeds of the partition, and asserted that such a "divisive mindset" is still a challenge for the country.

Modi said this on Friday, after inaugurating the year-long commemoration of "Vande Mataram" to mark 150 years of the national song.

Reacting to the prime minister's remarks, Ramesh had earlier shared extracts from Sabyasachi Bhattacharya's definitive biography of "Vande Mataram", giving the background of the Congress Working Committee resolution of October 29, 1937, that adopted the song.

"The prime minister is now accusing the Gurudev of harbouring a 'divisive ideology'. It is a shameful statement from a man whose lies and distortions have no limits. The people of India demand an unconditional apology," he had said.

On January 24, 1950, the Constituent Assembly officially adopted "Vande Mataram" as the national song, giving it enduring significance.

"I freely concede that the whole of Bankim's 'Bande Mataram' poem, read together with its context, is liable to be interpreted in ways that might wound Moslem susceptibilities, but a national song, though derived from it, which has spontaneously come to consist only of the first two stanzas of the original poem, need not remind us every time of the whole of it, much less of the story with which it was accidentally associated.

"It has acquired a separate individuality and an inspiring significance of its own in which I see nothing to offend any sect or community," Tagore was quoted as saying in Bhattacharya's book.

Ramesh shared portions of the English translation of Bankimchandra Chatterji's "Samya" that was published in 2002. Chatterji wrote "Vande Mataram" on the occasion of Akshaya Navami in 1875.

Ramesh had also pointed out that Tagore had first sung "Vande Mataram" at the December 1896 session of the Congress in Kolkata.