TMC protests Karnataka MP Visheshwar Hegde Kageri's Jana Gana Mana comment

Kolkata: The Trinamool Congress staged protests in Kolkata on Saturday, accusing the Bharatiya Janata Party of insulting poet philosopher Rabindranath Tagore, even as the saffron party in West Bengal moved to cash in on the Centre’s grand celebration of the 150^th anniversary of Vande Mataram penned by the state’s another literary icon Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay.

The ruling TMC staged protest in front of Jorasanko Thakurbari – the birthplace and the ancestral residence of Rabindranath Tagore – against a comment of the BJP’s Lok Sabha member Visheshwar Hegde Kageri, who was elected from the Uttar Kannada parliamentary constituency of Karnataka. Kageri recently said that Vande Mataram should have been the national anthem instead of Jana Gana Mana, which Tagore had composed to welcome the high officials of the British Raj. He made the comment while speaking at an event held at Honnavar in Uttar Kannada on the occasion of the 150^th anniversary of the national song.

“The BJP has not yet acted against its Lok Sabha member for insulting Jana Gana Mana and Rabindranath Tagore. Does it mean that the BJP, as a party, also supports what he said? Isn’t it seditious?” Shashi Panja, a senior TMC leader and a minister in the state government led by the party supremo Mamata Banerjee, questioned after the party’s protest rally on Saturday. She alleged that the BJP had always insulted West Bengal and its doyens like Tagore or the educator and social reformer Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar.

With the assembly elections in West Bengal just a few months away, the TMC quickly moved to turn the comment by the Uttar Kannada MP into a weapon to counter the saffron party’s bid to reap the political dividends of the grandiose celebration by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government at the Centre of the 150^th anniversary of Vande Mataram, which Chattopadhyay had penned in 1875.

With Modi, himself, inaugurating the year-long celebration of the national song in New Delhi on Friday, the state BJP chief, Samik Bhattacharya, and the Leader of the Opposition in the state assembly, Suvendu Adhikari, as well as other leaders of the saffron party spearheaded the commemorative events in West Bengal.

Adhikari, who had quit the TMC and joined the BJP in 2020, slammed Mamata Banerjee’s party for not being ‘patriotic’. He criticised the state’s TMC government for a notification issued by West Bengal Board of Secondary Education, making singing of Tagore’s “Banglar Mati, Banglar Jol (Bengal’s Land, Bengal’s Water)”, which was adopted as the official song of the state, mandatory at the morning assemblies in the schools supported by the state government. “The notification should have rather been issued for the singing of the national song Vande Mataram in the schools,” said Adhikari – a frontrunner for the BJP’s chief ministerial face in 2026 state assembly elections. 

Panja alleged that the BJP was trying to create false Bankim versus Rabindranath and Jana Gana Mana versus Vande Mataram narratives. “Both songs are precious legacies left for our nation by the two literary doyens,” the senior TMC leader said on Saturday, adding that the BJP always insulted West Bengal, because, people of diverse cultures, lived in harmony in this microcosm of India – foiling the nefarious agenda of the divisive forces.

The allegation that Tagore had written the Jana Gana Mana to hail British King George V, who had been proclaimed as the Emperor of India at the grand Delhi Durbar on December 12, 1911, is almost as old as the song, which the polymath had penned around the same time. The song had been first sung at the Indian National Congress session in Kolkata on December 28, 1911. Tagore, himself, had dismissed the allegation in a letter in November 1937. A part of the song had been adopted as the national anthem in 1950. But the old controversy around the song had kept making comebacks, despite being debunked by several historians and scholars.

Kageri’s comment on Jana Gana Mana put the BJP in a tight spot in West Bengal, which already seen widespread protests recently over the order of the Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma of neighbouring Assam for police probe against a Congress leader, who had sung Tagore’s “O Amar Sonar Bangla, Ami Tomay Bhalobasi” (Oh My Golden Bangla, I love thee) – the national anthem of Bangladesh.