Nationalist Demands in the New Law
The Prevention of Insults to National Honour (Amendment) Bill, 2026 was introduced by Amit Shah in the Rajya Sabha on 24 July 2026. Its Statement of Objects and Reasons recalls that Rajendra Prasad, as President of the Constituent Assembly, said on 24 January 1950 that Vande Mataram would be “honoured equally” with Jana Gana Mana. It notes that no legal provision existed to prevent interference with the singing of the National Song and proposes to address this by amending Section 3 of the 1971 Act, which already made intentionally preventing the singing of the National Anthem, or disturbing an assembly engaged in singing it, punishable with imprisonment of up to three years, a fine, or both, with a mandatory minimum of one year for a second and subsequent conviction. The amendment extends that same offence, and the same penalties, to the National Song. Article 51A(a) names the Constitution, the national flag and the national anthem as objects of citizens’ respect; it has never named the National Song.
The amendment arrived alongside a separate, longer-running push to change what gets sung. Vande Mataram has six stanzas; since 1937, only the first two have been used at national gatherings, a convention set by the Congress Working Committee. The Ministry of Home Affairs had already moved to reverse that convention on its own, issuing a protocol on 28 January 2026 requiring the full six-stanza version at government, ceremonial and cultural events, well before this amendment existed. That protocol was advisory and, as the courts would go on to hold twice over the following months, carried no penalty of its own. Only after those two challenges failed did the government tighten the position twice more: a July 9 MHA letter to all states specifying that only the official six-stanza version could be recited whenever the song was sung in mass singing, and then, on 24 July, the amendment itself. Where both the song and the anthem are performed at one event, Vande Mataram now goes first. Schools are directed to open assemblies with it, although many schools already practiced this of their own volition. It is to be played at state functions, civilian award ceremonies, flag-hoisting events, and the arrivals and departures of the President and Governors.
The Political Fight Over the Song
The push for the full six-stanza version followed a ten-hour special discussion in the Lok Sabha in December 2025 marking the song’s 150th anniversary, in which the Prime Minister accused the Congress of having “sowed the seeds of division” by trimming the song. In 1937, the Congress Working Committee, after consultation with Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rabindranath Tagore, Subhas Chandra Bose, Rajendra Prasad and Vallabhbhai Patel, decided that only the first two stanzas would be used at national gatherings because of objections to the religious imagery in the later verses. Tagore had written to Nehru that the first two stanzas had “acquired a separate individuality and an inspiring significance of its own,” while the later verses, read in context, “[are] liable to be interpreted in ways that might wound [Muslim] susceptibilities.” Congress rejected the Prime Minister’s charge, pointing to this 1937 decision and Tagore’s letter and accusing the government of manufacturing the controversy for present gain in the context of then upcoming elections, a charge Priyanka Gandhi Vadra made directly. The Congress Working Committee has since reaffirmed the two-stanza position for its own party programmes.
The dispute has now also moved into a question of federal authority after the Karnataka government ordered on 8 September that only the first two stanzas be sung at state government programmes, except when the President, Vice-President, Prime Minister or Governor is present. Within days, advocate Girish Bharadwaj filed a PIL challenging the state’s authority to prescribe a shorter version, arguing that the matter falls within Parliament’s residuary legislative powers and that the state order conflicts with the 2026 amendment to the Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act. The petition also challenged the procedure by which the Karnataka Cabinet took the decision, alleging that it was approved as an “Informal Discussion” without a Cabinet Note or Law Department advice. Governor Thaawarchand Gehlot then wrote to Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar, invoking Articles 162, 256 and 257(1) and asking the government to reconsider its order on the ground that it conflicted with the Union’s statutory and executive framework. On 16 September, BJP MLA S.N. Channabasappa walked out of a government programme in Shivamogga after only the first two stanzas were sung.
The opposition, however, has also been weak in resisting the Centre’s position. In Kerala, the Congress-led UDF government initially circulated the Centre’s instruction that Vande Mataram be sung in full during the Har Ghar Tiranga campaign from 9 to 17 August. This put a Congress-led government in the position of appearing to implement the same six-stanza version promoted by the BJP-led Union government, despite Congress’s objections to treating the full version, with its references to Hindu deities, as a compulsory expression of national identity. The CPI(M) criticised the UDF’s position, with Leader of the Opposition Pinarayi Vijayan arguing that the song “in its entirety is not compatible with secularism” and that “there is nothing wrong with reciting the opening stanzas”, and accusing the UDF of surrendering to an RSS agenda. The UDF subsequently clarified that it would not follow the full version, and the state government ultimately omitted Vande Mataram from its official Independence Day function.
The song’s meaning has remained contested within the communities whose religious commitments are most directly implicated by it, a history the government’s “everybody knows what is national song” formulation simply passes over. The distinction made in 1937 remains central to the dispute: the Congress Working Committee accepted the first two stanzas for national gatherings while recognising objections to the later verses and their religious imagery. Muslim religious authorities have continued to make this distinction. Darul Uloom Deoband and Maulana Mahmood Madani have objected to the later verses on the grounds that their depiction of the motherland as divine conflicts with the Islamic doctrine of tawhid, while the All India Sunni Ulema Board ruled in 2006 that Muslims could sing the first two stanzas.
The dispute, however, has not been confined to Muslim objections. During the 2006 centenary controversy, the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee initially instructed its schools not to sing Vande Mataram, with its president arguing that it promoted a particular religion and did not fulfil the aspirations of minorities, before subsequently backing away from that position. In 2026, the Andhra Pradesh Christian Leaders Forum objected to the newly mandated full version, specifically citing its references to Durga and their implications for Christian beliefs. The question is therefore not simply whether Vande Mataram is the national song, but what religious content the state is asking people to affirm when it mandates the complete text. The Home Ministry’s circular treats that underlying question as though it had never been contested. Where it does allude to the religious objection, it reduces it to a question of Muslim reluctance, allowing a disagreement over religious belief to be recast as a question of patriotism.
The Text Behind the Mandate
The distinction between the first two stanzas and the later verses can be traced to how the song was written. Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay had written the first two stanzas in the 1870s, describing a land of rivers, fruit and gentle winds. He added four more when he incorporated the song into his 1882 novel Anandamath, and those later stanzas carry the divine imagery: the third stanza calls the motherland “protector of millions and destroyer of enemies,” the fourth names her Durga, Lakshmi and Saraswati outright, while the fifth and sixth complete the poem as a vow of devotion.
Anandamath provides the setting in which those later stanzas acquire their political and religious meaning. Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay is one of the key figures of proto-Hindutva politics in British India, and the novel is set during the Sannyasi Rebellion. Its protagonist, Mahendra, a zamindar separated from his family amid famine and unrest, falls in with the Santans, a band of ascetic soldiers who have taken up arms to liberate the motherland from Muslim rule, with the British entering the story only later. One of Satyananda’s disciples wants to “pull down the city of the renegades” and “throw it into the river.” Bhavananda, inducting Mahendra into the cause, tells him “unless we drive these tipsy long-beards away, a Hindu can no longer hope to save his religion,” and answers the question of method with “we will beat them.” He then leads Mahendra to the order’s temple, where, standing before the idols of Durga and Kali, he tries to fill him with religious fervor for the fight ahead. Elsewhere in the novel, the Santans send emissaries into villages to gather bands of Hindus, then raid Muslim settlements, which are burned “to ashes.” Characters imagine the day a mosque will be razed to build a temple to Radha-Madhava in its place. The four later stanzas of Vande Mataram were written for, and inside, this story. This is the context of the text now mandated by law.
The Limits of the Law’s Imagination
That January 28 protocol was challenged twice. In February, Muhammed Sayeed Noori approached the Supreme Court, arguing that requiring the complete version raised questions of religious freedom and conscience. On 25 March, the Court declined to entertain the petition, holding that the protocol was advisory and carried no penalty for those who chose not to sing, while leaving open the possibility of intervention if the advisory hardened into actual discrimination or coercion. A parallel challenge in the Karnataka High Court, filed by Bengaluru-based advocate Somashekhar Rajavamshi, objected specifically to the inclusion of stanzas three through six and their references to Durga, Saraswati and Lakshmi; the High Court dismissed it on 9 April on the same ground, that the protocol did not make singing the full version mandatory.
The 2026 amendment changes that position. The January protocol could prescribe the full version’s use; it could not, on its own, criminalise a refusal to sing it. The amendment extends the National Song to the Section 3 offence applicable to the National Anthem since 1971: intentionally preventing its singing, or disturbing an assembly engaged in singing it.
On 22 September 2026, the Supreme Court heard a petition by T. M. Krishna, with senior advocate S. Muralidhar appearing for him. The petition challenges the 2026 amendment insofar as it extends the existing criminal provision to the National Song. It also challenges the Home Ministry’s directions requiring the complete six-stanza version at official functions. The petition argues that the amended provision and the directions violate Articles 14 (equality before the law), 15(1) (prohibition of discrimination on specified grounds), 19(1)(a) (freedom of speech and expression), 21 (protection of life and personal liberty) and 25(1) (freedom of conscience and the right to profess, practise and propagate religion).
The Court refused to decide whether the National Song should consist of two stanzas or six, indicating that this was for the democratically elected state to determine rather than for the Court to prescribe. Justice Bagchi also questioned the suggestion that religious references in all six stanzas are, by themselves, incompatible with the Constitution’s secular character, pointing to the reference to God in the US national anthem. That another country’s anthem contains a religious line does not make it a benchmark for what India’s Constitution should tolerate; it only shows that one other state has also let religious language sit inside a national symbol. Whether a lingering religious motif of that kind is compatible with secularism is exactly the question in front of the Court, and pointing to a second, unexamined instance of the same thing does not answer it. The Centre has two weeks to respond, and the Court has not yet ruled on the constitutional validity of the amendment or the six-stanza directions.
At the hearing, however, the Court drew a distinction between the State’s choice of a national symbol and the use of criminal law in relation to participation in it. Nothing in the amendment says that simply refusing to sing Vande Mataram is itself an offence; the crime, as under the original Section 3, is preventing others from singing or disturbing an assembly engaged in it. The question before the Court is therefore whether the protection recognised in Bijoe Emmanuel, which concerned refusal to sing the National Anthem under that same original section, also protects a person who refuses to sing the National Song on grounds of conscience or religion while leaving others free to do so.
That leaves an odd gap. If the amendment truly does not touch a refusal that neither prevents others from singing nor disturbs an assembly, the state loses nothing by saying so outright, and Krishna’s petition should fall outside the law’s reach without a fight. The Centre resisted even the issuing of notice, and Solicitor General Mehta pressed the Court not to entertain the petition at all. That resistance points to a state interest that Section 3’s text does not itself supply: the discretion to withhold, for as long as possible, any confirmation that non-participation is safe.
Bijoe Emmanuel v. State of Kerala, which the Court said still governs the field and has never been challenged, is the case that established that refusal to sing the National Anthem, where the person neither prevents others from singing nor disturbs the assembly, does not constitute an offence under Section 3. In 1986, the Court considered three schoolchildren in Kerala who belonged to the Jehovah’s Witnesses faith. They believed that singing the National Anthem was incompatible with their religious convictions, although they had no objection to the words or sentiments of Jana Gana Mana. During their school’s morning assembly, they stood silently while the anthem was sung. After the issue was raised, they were expelled from school, despite an inquiry finding that they were law-abiding and had shown no disrespect. The Supreme Court held that their expulsion violated their fundamental rights. It also held that there was no law obliging anyone to sing the National Anthem and that their standing silently while it was sung did not constitute an offence under Section 3 because it neither prevented the singing nor disturbed the assembly.
The Court in Bijoe Emmanuel answered for the facts it had: the children stood, in silence, while others sang, and that was respect enough. Whether sitting, or some other form of non-participation, would count the same way was never argued before it, and the judgment does not say. The Court’s later National Anthem jurisprudence went further than Bijoe Emmanuel by imposing a general requirement to stand, but went no further in deciding whether an able-bodied person who chose not to comply had thereby committed an act of disrespect. In Shyam Narayan Chouksey v. Union of India, the Court initially ordered, in 2016, that the National Anthem be played before every feature film and that everyone present stand. It subsequently recognised exceptions for people unable to stand and for occasions when the anthem appeared within a film, newsreel or documentary. In 2018, it made the playing of the anthem before films optional and handed the wider question of its regulation to the government. What remained unresolved was whether an able-bodied person who deliberately remained seated when the National Anthem was played had thereby shown disrespect.
Article 51A(a) requires citizens to respect the Constitution, the national flag and the national anthem. That language concerns respect for specified national symbols, while Section 3 concerns conduct that interferes with their public performance. The Constitution speaks of an attitude of respect; Section 3 defines specific acts that the law prohibits. Bijoe Emmanuel is the only case here that actually examined a specific act of non-participation and ruled on whether it counted as respectful: the children stood silently while others sang. Chouksey, by contrast, imposed a general rule about what everyone present in a cinema hall had to do when the anthem was played, and later withdrew the requirement that the anthem be played there at all. The distinction between respectful and disrespectful non-participation has therefore never actually been adjudicated on its own terms. That leaves the discretion to decide sitting with whoever is enforcing the law in the moment, not with any settled rule a citizen could rely on in advance. And even supposing that gap could be closed, and the state produced a clean definition of respectful non-participation tomorrow, a further question is why a person should have to demonstrate respect for a national symbol through participation of any kind, rather than simply being left alone by the law altogether.
Article 51A(a) itself answers none of this. The Fundamental Duties, inserted into the Constitution by the 42nd Amendment in 1976, are not enforceable in court. No citizen has ever been prosecuted for an abstract failure to respect the Constitution, the flag or the anthem. Section 3 punishes specific conduct: preventing a performance, disturbing an assembly, even though the boundaries of that conduct can still be interpreted and policed according to the discretion of whoever is enforcing the law. Article 51A(a) supplies the word “respect” and nothing else. It does not say what respect consists of, and it does not say respect must be shown rather than merely left unviolated. The state has built a criminal statute that reaches only interference, and rested it on a duty clause that was written to describe an attitude, not to compel an act.
The Right Not to Sing
The present controversy asks a larger question about the limits of state power over national rituals. A person may have a religious objection to the text, reject the use of a national symbol altogether, or simply choose not to participate. If that refusal does not prevent anyone else from singing, what is the state entitled to demand from the person who refuses? Even as the space for conscientious objection shrinks in the shadow of ultranationalism, we must continue to ask: why should the state require that refusal to take a prescribed form of respect, and why can it not leave room for people to decline participation altogether?
