The national song of India has once again stirred up a hornets’ nest — without even being sung this time. At its 30th general session at Deoband, the Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind set out the refusal to sing Vande Mataram as a definite marker of Muslim identity. It cited religious incompatibility as the basis for its fatwa on the song. The Muslim community, it reasoned, had scriptural sanction to pay obeisance to none other than the Prophet. It is not surprising that the Jamiat, which has put down other requisites as mandatory for the faithful — among which are the boycott of the mass entertainment media and the prohibition of higher education for women — thought it necessary to highlight its stand on the song as crucial to its project of identity-formation. The singing, or the not-singing, of Vande Mataram has been made into a determinant of a specific identity — the diehard patriot — thanks to similar efforts by Hindu fundamentalists to demarcate identities. The Jamiat, in that context, could not have ignored such an important benchmark. Neither could it have left unmentioned the fact that non-compliance with an established State practice should not be construed as being unpatriotic. In saying so, it is stating the obvious. No mature democracy can put up illiberal standards before its citizenry or appear churlish when the exercise of individual choice (of not singing a song) overrides political diktats. But in using religion to establish the case of the Muslim community, the Jamiat is making the same error that it wishes to accuse the Other of committing.

The national song has a unique place in the history of independent India that is being purposely overlooked to further narrow interests. Vande Mataram was instrumental in uniting communities, whether Sikh, Muslim, Parsi, Christian, Arya Samaji or Hindu, in the fight against colonialism. It is this shared memory of the freedom struggle that had prompted the founders of India’s Constitution to adopt it as a national song. Even at that crucial juncture, the communally-minded had used the song to divide the people. It is ironical that both the Hindutva brigade and the religious leadership of the Muslim community, over the years, have tried to revive that fractious and bitter memory instead of furthering memories of how a song contributed to the creation of a common history for a country and its people.