BJP President Amit Shah on Wednesday said the decision by the Congress in 1937 to accept the first two stanzas and drop the remaining stanzas of ‘Vande Mataram’ by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay started the appeasement policy and led to the division of the country.
“Had the Congress not committed this mistake, the country would not have been divided,” Mr. Shah said in Kolkata, delivering the first Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay Memorial Lecture organised by Shyama Prasad Research Foundation.
The BJP president said historians blamed the Khilafat movement or the Divide and Rule policy of the British for the country’s partition but as student of politics and history, he felt that by “dividing ‘Vande Mataram’ the appeasement policy which the Congress accepted led to country’s division in future.”
Describing the decision of dropping the stanzas of the song as a “big mistake,” Mr. Shah said the Congress also put a “blot of communalism” on such a pure work of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay.
“This [the song] is not related to any religion. There is no attempt to show anyone in bad light,” he said.
The BJP president said that it was the ‘cultural nationalism’ of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s ‘Vande Mataram’ which was borrowed by Shyama Prasad Mukherjee in the years to come. “Vande Mataram is nothing but a reflection of cultural nationalism of the country,” he said.
Mr. Shah quoted literary critic Namwar Singh and Aurobindo Ghosh on how ‘Vande Mataram’ written in the novel ‘Anandamath’ in 1870 turned out to be the battle cry for the country’s independence. ‘Anandamath’ was published in 1882.
The gathering which was also an attempt by the BJP to reach intellectuals from Bengal saw the presence of noted Bengali writer Buddhadeb Guha, academician and biographer of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay Amitrasudan Bhattacharya, professor of bengali and former Vice Chancellor Achintya Biswas. Others present were Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose grandniece Purabi Roy and former VC of Burdwan University Smritikumar Sarkar. However, stalwarts of Bengal’s civil society and almost the entire clan of Kolkata intellectuals did not attend the programme.
The BJP president who is on a two day tour of West Bengal, held a number of meetings during the day including one with State unit’s election management team and a Vistarak Baithak with party’s office bearers.On Thursday Mr Shah will visit Purulia, where the death of two BJP workers earlier this month had created a political furore. He will address a public meeting in the district. Mr Shah is also scheduled to visited Tarapith temple in State’s Birbhum district.