The “Vande Mataram” debate was recently at the centre of a special discussion in Parliament to mark 150 years of the song. As in the past, the conversation about the Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s song narrowed to who sang it, who refused to sing it and what that refusal is supposed to signify. Much of the heat was generated by a government that has turned the history of the song into an accusation against its opponents. In the middle of this ritualised exchange, one uncomfortable fact is easy to miss: the country debates the song while ignoring the very conditions it celebrates.Bankim’s framing of Sujalam Sufalam Malyaja Shitalam imagined a motherland drawn from nature – rivers filled with clean water, fields abundant with grain, air that soothed and sustained. It was, in other words, an environmental and moral description of what a thriving civilisation owed its people. If this is the standard, the debates about the song reveal something deeper than competing versions of history. It shows the widening distance between performative nationalism and the material life of the nation.Consider Malyaja Shitalam; cool, fragrant air. India now ranks 176 out of 180 countries in the 2024 Environmental Performance Index, with some of the worst air quality indicators in the world. No district in the country meets the WHO guideline of 5 micrograms per cubic metre for clean air, and polluted air is estimated to kill around 1.5 million Indians every year.In Delhi, the anual mean PM2.5 levels hover at levels twenty times above what the WHO considers safe. The air that once symbolised the tenderness of the motherland has now become one of its harshest threats. Yet official celebration of Vande Mataram grows louder even as the right to breathe clean air is treated as an individual adjustment, involving masks and private air purifiers.A detail from Abanindranath Tagore’s Banga Mata, later renamed Bharat Mata, based on how Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay imagined the nation in his novel Anandamath.The idea of Sufalam, abundant food, shows a similar pattern in reality. The Global Hunger Index 2025 ranks India at 102 of 123 countries, and hence in the “serious” category. Even by the government’s own National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) figures, more than one in three young children are are stunted and nearly one in five are wasted.These statistics are not simply indicators of poverty. They are an indictment of how national growth has failed to translate into nutritional security. The public distribution system has focused on filling stomachs, not nourishing bodies. The result is a silent crisis that does not feature in political speeches but in the height and weight of millions of children. A government that claims to speak for the poor finds it easier to argue about who stands up for a song than to explain why so many children cannot stand up with the strength that song imagined.Now consider Sujalam, clean water. Only 28% of urban wastewater and sewage are safely treated in India. Rivers considered sacred still receive more sewage than fresh water. Groundwater extraction in many states has crossed sustainable limits. A country that imagined itself as a land of clear, flowing rivers now finds these rivers carrying the residue of its neglect.The state prefers to rename schemes and sloganise purity while leaving local bodies to cope with the daily reality of contamination.In the present debate, the Prime Minister argued that a Congress led by the first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru “cut Vande Mataram to pieces” to “appease” the Jinnah-led Muslim League. Senior ministers spoke of a historic betrayal that weakened the nation. The Opposition countered that the decision to use only the first two stanzas was made after leading figures, such as Rabindranath Tagore, raised concerns that the song was meant to be inclusive. Even so, the real tragedy is not that Vande Mataram is controversial but that the material world it praised is collapsing without controversy. Clean air has become a privilege, clean water a mirage and nutrition a statistic that returns each year with little changed.Political theorist Benedict Anderson described nations as imagined communities, held together by the stories they tell about themselves. The problem begins when those stories harden into ritual and people and governments fixate on symbols instead of the realities that shape people’s lives. Bankim imagined the motherland as an environment that sustained life. If that image still matters, the real test of patriotism lies not in the volume of our declarations but in whether we can restore the land to the conditions that inspired the poem.If Vande Mataram is to be honoured in full, the promise of Sujalam Sufalam Malyaja Shitalam must be treated as a core policy obligation of parliament rather than used for political theatrics.Jehosh Paul is a lawyer and development practitioner. Views expressed are personal.