New Delhi: Upping the ante against Congress’s decision to stick to singing only two stanzas of Vande Mataram, home minister Amit Shah on Thursday exhorted people to rally against the opposition party’s stand and said BJP will take its campaign to the masses and legislatures.“I want to remind the country that Congress in 1937 chose to truncate Vande Mataram for appeasement of Muslims that sowed the seeds of the nation’s Partition. It strengthened the two-nation theory. Finally, it led to the country’s division and birth of Pakistan,” Shah said. He called the CWC resolution a startling and anti-national decision.The nation once made the mistake of dividing Vande Mataram into two parts and we suffered serious consequences for this,” Amit Shah said. He added Congress had proven that under Rahul Gandhi’, it was forcefully following its appeasement politics, while lauding Vande Mataram as an immortal creation which inspired countless freedom fighters as they went to the gallows or spent many years in incarceration.Defending its decision, Congress has said the resolution to sing only the first two stanzas was adopted in the presence of several great figures, including Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Chandra Bose and Rabindranath Tagore.BJP has argued that Congress’s stand in 1937 was an outcome of its eagerness to placate Muslim League, and it had also made several other concessions to the M A Jinnah-led party, including agreeing to cow slaughter. BJP president Nitin Nabin said Congress had become the new Muslim League, accusing the party of formalising its insult of the national song in the resolution. Shah dubbed the 1937 resolution a “historic mistake”, which, he said, Modi govt had corrected on the 150th anniversary of the song’s creation by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay with its decision that its full version will be sung or played at all govt functions.
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Parliament had also given it legal protection, he said, in a reference to the recent amendment to Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act, which has brought the national song on a par with the national anthem, Jana Gana Mana, making any slight to it a penal offence.The home minister said Congress was giving its British-era resolution more weight than Parliament of a free India.Shah’s assertion that BJP will go to people and legislatures against it is an indication that the governing party will seize on the issue that hews with its nationalism plank to launch protests and raise the issue in state assemblies and Parliament.The first meeting of the party’s national office-bearers under its president Nitin Nabin Saturday may also take up the issue.
