There is an anecdote worth beginning with, because it captures something the current controversy has buried. Oscar Fernandes was a top organisational leader of the Congress for nearly four decades, a man who quietly nurtured generations of young Congressmen and women. Often, when a student or youth leader approached him for a post in the party, he would ask them to do one thing first: recite Vande Mataram. For him the national song and the core of Congress ideology were a single continuum. One could not aspire to a party position without first feeling the national song in one’s chest.Hold that image against the noise of the present moment. A party that recites Vande Mataram at its conventions, a party that has adopted it as the national song, a party that has ensured that every session of parliament and the state assemblies closes with it, is today being labelled anti-Vande Mataram. Irony, one is tempted to say, dies a thousand deaths.1937: Timing mattersThe two standard stanzas of Vande Mataram were decided upon by Congress leaders in 1937. Among them were Mahatma Gandhi, Subhas Chandra Bose, and Sardar Patel. Also in the group was Rabindranath Tagore.The timing matters. 1937 was the very year the Congress swept the pre-independence provincial elections while the Muslim League was routed, failing to dominate even the Muslim-majority provinces. This was the period historians refer to as the parting of ways, when after two decades of friction the final showdown between the Congress and the Muslim League had begun. The men who trimmed Vande Mataram to two stanzas were not surrendering to the League but fighting it in philosophy, programme and politics, and winning.Today the nationalism of those very Congress leaders, the men who led the independence movement and who fought the Muslim League, is being questioned by a party whose ideological parivar (family), the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Hindu Mahasabha, sided with the British during the Quit India Movement and partnered with Muslim League.After the 1937 elections, in those same years when Congress was fighting Muslim League, the Hindu Mahasabha, led by Savarkar, was an alliance partner of the Muslim League in coalition governments in three provinces: Sind, the North-West Frontier Province and Bengal.The present BJP leaders, heirs to the pro-British record of the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha, now have the audacity to question the nationalism of the Congress leaders who led the freedom movement.They want to delegitimise the Congress legacy of Vande Mataram by arbitrarily bringing in a longer version and forcing it upon the people of India and upon the history of India. But whatever the attempts of fanatics or of those in power to whitewash history, the historical facts remain unchanged.The tradition begins in 1896The historical facts are undeniable. Since 1896, sessions of the Indian National Congress have opened with Vande Mataram, and that tradition continues to this day. It was Rabindranath Tagore who first sang the song publicly, at the Calcutta session of the Congress in 1896. He did not merely sing it, he set it to a tune. The session was presided over by Rahimatullah Sayani, a Muslim. That single fact should be enough to complicate any attempt to cast the song as a weapon of one community against another.The song then moved out of literature and into the street. After the 1905 Partition of Bengal, during the Swadeshi agitation, Vande Mataram became a mass cry, chanted in marches and processions, printed on pamphlets, carried to the gallows. It was, in the plainest sense, a Congress war cry of the freedom movement.When Bhikaji Cama unfurled an early version of the national flag at Stuttgart in 1907, the words Vande Mataram were stitched across it. That flag, and that war cry of Vande Mataram, belong to the Congress legacy.In 1946, while endorsing the new greeting ‘Jai Hind’ in Guwahati, first used by Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, Mahatma Gandhi was careful to say that it should not displace Vande Mataram, acknowledging the decades of emotional weight the song had gathered. Even in blessing a new slogan, Gandhi protected the old one.What makes this revealing is that it sits alongside Gandhi’s own carefulness about the song. He was never an uncritical enthusiast. Writing in Harijan on July 1, 1939, he had said that Vande Mataram should not be sung where people genuinely object to it, and in his Constructive Programme he urged students not to impose it on others. So his 1946 defence was not majoritarian insistence. It was a man who understood the song’s emotional and historical weight, wanting to preserve it as heritage, while refusing to weaponise it against anyone. He held two things at once: to protect the old song from being forgotten, and never to force it on the unwilling.The equal status was granted in 1950, not todayIt is not Amit Shah or Narendra Modi who are now giving Vande Mataram its equal status. It was settled 76 years ago. It was Rajendra Prasad, president of the Constituent Assembly and later the first president of India, who did it. At the assembly’s final sitting on January 24, 1950, he declared from the Chair that Jana Gana Mana will be the National Anthem and then added the decisive words: that Vande Mataram, “which has played a historic part in the struggle for Indian freedom, shall be honoured equally with Jana Gana Mana and shall have equal status with it.” The record notes that the statement was met with applause and no objection from any member. The parity exists because a Congress leader placed it in the record at the birth of the Republic and the entire Constituent Assembly led by Congress supported it and applauded it.The BJP, led by its ideological fountainhead the RSS, had no part in any of this. Yet today it wants to appropriate the national song to whitewash its own absence from the freedom movement. It has the audacity to suggest that the leading freedom fighters, Mahatma Gandhi, Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Dr Rajendra Prasad and Acharya Narendra Dev, were all wrong.If the BJP today claims that singing only two stanzas of Vande Mataram is anti-national, then it is effectively declaring every one of these freedom fighters anti-national.And that is precisely what it is doing – whitewashing history.Who was where during the freedom movementWhen the Congress launched the Quit India Movement in August 1942, the Hindu Mahasabha under Savarkar openly opposed it and boycotted it officially.Savarkar issued a letter to his supporters. titled ‘Stick to Your Posts,’ instructing Hindu Sabhaites who sat in municipalities, local bodies, legislatures or the army to remain at their posts and not join the movement.In the same period the Mahasabha ran military recruitment drives to enlist Hindus in the British army, the army that fought against Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army, too. At Madurai session of Hindu Mahasabha, Savarkar reported the success in enlisting a lakh Hindus in British Army!During those years the Hindu Mahasabha shared power with the Muslim League in coalition governments in three provinces: Bengal, Sind and the North-West Frontier Province.In Bengal, Syama Prasad Mookerjee, later the founder president of the Jan Sangh, was a senior minister in Fazlul Haq ministry. Jan Sangh was the earlier avatar of BJP.In a letter to the British Governor of Bengal dated July 26, 1942, Mookerjee wrote that the Fazlul Haq government, along with its ally Hindu Mahasabha, would make every effort to defeat the Quit India Movement in the province, and put forward a concrete proposal to that end.One song and two purposesHere lies the real distinction. The same three words carried two different meanings before 1947. In Congress hands, Vande Mataram was a salutation to a personified but deliberately inclusive motherland, kept to two stanzas precisely so that every Indian could share it. It was a war cry for independence from foreign rule.The Sangh Parivar, born of the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS, never used Vande Mataram to fight for freedom. It used the song to invoke a communal identity for India and to fan communal passions. And it wants to use it for the same purpose even now.For the Congress it was a cry to unite Indians against empire. For the other, it was increasingly a marker of communal identity.That is why the present attempt to declare the two-stanza version anti-national is so revealing. If singing the version chosen in 1937 is anti-national, then Gandhi,, Tagore, Nehru, Patel, Azad, Rajendra Prasad were also anti-national. To delegitimise the two-stanza Vande Mataram is to declare the architects of independence anti-national, which is an absurdity only power can dare to utter.The inheritance remainsHistory can be spun by those in power, but the facts beneath the spin do not move. The Congress did not oppose Vande Mataram; it carried the song from a Bengali novel into the heart of a national movement, gave it a tune, printed it on the first flag, sang it in jail and on the way to the gallows, and enshrined its equal status in the Constituent Assembly.For Congress, Vande Mataram is not a possession to be seized in 2026.For the Congress it is a legacy of the freedom movement, a part of its history and a symbol of its nationalism. It will remain so, in the very form settled in 1937, whatever the attempts of the RSS.Gurdeep Singh Sappal is Permanent Invitee, Congress Working Committee.