AhlulBayt News Agency (ABNA): The opening day of the Gujarat Assembly’s three-day monsoon session on Wednesday was marked by a political controversy after Imran Khedawala, the only Muslim MLA in the 182-member House, refused to remain standing for the newly added stanzas of the national song, Vande Mataram.
Khedawala, 50, a Congress MLA who represents the Jamalpur-Khadia constituency in Ahmedabad’s old city, said he respects the national song but does not agree with the additional portion now being sung.
Khedawala, a former corporator and two-time MLA from Jamalpur-Khadia — one of the few Muslim-majority constituencies in Ahmedabad — is seen as a prominent minority face of the Gujarat Congress.
“I have great respect for the national song and for the portion that has been sung by our great leaders, from Mahatma Gandhi, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Rabindranath Tagore, and B R Ambedkar,” he was quoted as saying by media reports.
“If they never objected to that paragraph, who is the BJP to tell me anything?” he said.
According to Khedawala, he stood during the traditional rendition of the song but returned to his seat when the additional lines began. “The BJP is not bigger than Gandhi or Patel. Our leaders, including Mallikarjun Kharge, Sonia Gandhi, and Rahul Gandhi, have made it clear. This is also my personal stand: I will not sing the additional paragraph,” he said.
The incident happened as the Assembly, as per long-standing tradition, began its proceedings with Vande Mataram.
The ruling BJP hit back sharply. Gujarat Minister of State for Forest, Environment and Climate Change Pravin Mali criticised Khedawala and said his act was an insult to the national song and to Assembly tradition.
“There has been a tradition in the Assembly for years that its sessions start with Vande Mataram. Congress MLA Imran Khedawala stood but sat down immediately, which is an insult to the national song,” Mali said. He demanded that the Congress clarify whether this was Khedawala’s personal decision or the party’s official line.
The BJP also said the additional portion had been approved through parliamentary procedure and that standing for it is now a statutory obligation.
Vande Mataram was written by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee in Sanskrit and Bengali and first appeared in his 1882 novel Anandamath. The original composition has six stanzas.
Since 1937, only the first two stanzas — which contain no religious references and focus on the motherland — have been sung as the national song at official functions.
The decision to truncate the song dates back to October 1937, when the Congress Working Committee, under Jawaharlal Nehru, after consulting Mahatma Gandhi, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Subhash Chandra Bose and Rabindranath Tagore, adopted a resolution recognising “the validity of the objections raised by Muslim friends to certain parts of the song”. The committee noted that the later four stanzas contain allusions to Hindu goddesses Durga, Lakshmi and Saraswati, which were seen as inconsistent with a secular national ethos. In 1950, the Constituent Assembly officially adopted only these first two stanzas as the National Song.
The controversy has revived after the Winter Session of Parliament in December 2025, when the Centre held an extended debate on Vande Mataram. Prime Minister Narendra Modi said during the debate that “Vande Mataram was divided first, and then the country was divided”.
Following the debate, the Ministry of Home Affairs / Ministry of Culture issued new guidelines on January 28, 2026, making the full six-stanza, 3-minute 10-second version mandatory at official ceremonies. The order stated that the approved six-stanza version must be used, restoring verses often omitted since the pre-Independence period, and that Vande Mataram would be played before Jana Gana Mana.
The move has been politically divisive. Congress has said it will continue to sing only the first two stanzas as decided in 1937, while some opposition leaders like Shashi Tharoor questioned making all six stanzas mandatory, saying the amendment was passed without proper discussion.
In Gujarat, the state government has implemented the full version at the start of the Assembly session, which led to Wednesday’s protest.
Khedawala has been the Gujarat Assembly’s only Muslim MLA since the 2022 state elections. Gujarat has a Muslim population of nearly 10 percent.
The number of Muslim MLAs in the state has declined over the years. There were two Muslim MLAs in the 2012 Assembly and three in 2017, all elected on Congress tickets. The BJP, which has governed Gujarat for more than three decades, has not fielded a Muslim candidate in the state elections during this period.
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