A day after the Congress Working Committee reaffirmed that only the first two stanzas of Vande Mataram would be sung at party events, the Indian Express reports a growing unease inside sections of the party that the leadership should have handled the matter with more nuance.
The timing is what several of them point to. Barely a week earlier, the full national song had been sung at official Independence Day events in the Congress-ruled states of Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka and Telangana, and in Jharkhand, where the party is a junior ally in the JMM-led government. The Congress-led government in Kerala skipped the song altogether.
The complaints in the paper are unattributed and they do not all say the same thing. One CWC member called it a wide ball — the party could have left it rather than having a go at it. Another pointed to what else was in play: the aspirations of students, the allegations of donation theft at the Ayodhya Ram temple, a government that seemed to be on the back foot. We should not have played to the BJP's strength, that member said.
A third went back to Parliament. Congress did not oppose the Prevention of Insults to National Honour (Amendment) Bill, 2026, when the Lok Sabha cleared it in about fifteen minutes on 30 July amid protests from Congress and Samajwadi Party MPs; the DMK was the only opposition party to take part in the discussion. We did not oppose the Bill in Parliament because the House was in turmoil and it passed in the din, the leader said — but it is also a fact that we did not oppose it outside Parliament, as we spoke against delimitation or the FCRA amendment Bill. Now we are saying all this.
The party's legal wing head, the lawyer Abhishek Manu Singhvi, told the Indian Express he had given the leadership his legal opinion, interpreting the law as it stands today, and had drawn a distinction between public and private functions.
Why it is on the board
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확인: The Indian Express