India, Dec. 22 -- There are moments in a nation's life when its identity is not merely argued or legislated into being but sung into presence. The creation of Vande Mataram was one such moment in India's awakening, when Anandamath offered the country a divine feminine form through which to imagine itself. This must be read within a global moment when nationalism was being shaped and contested. Against this backdrop, India articulated a uniquely civilisational variant rooted in cultural memory rather than territorial assertion. Indian nationalism has always been plural and metaphorical, shaped as much by political movements as by lyrical, devotional utterances. Vande Mataram is a cultural gesture that condensed into two words the emotional grammar of a civilisation seeking freedom not only from colonial rule but from internal diminishment. Yet, a century and a half after Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay composed it, Independent India finds itself returning to debates that the freedom struggle had already settled. When sections of today's political class refuse to stand with the symbolism of Vande Mataram, framing their objection in doctrinal terms, they inadvertently echo the anxieties of pre-Independence communal politics. The irony is stark. Those who claim to defend pluralism repeat arguments once advanced by the colonial state and amplified by the Muslim League, presenting indigenous metaphors as divisive. India's nationalism is unlike the French model of State-forged citizenship or the ethnic nationalisms of Europe. Its animating impulse is civilisational memory with a recognition that people belonging to multiple religions, languages, and lifeworlds can be bound by a shared cultural sensibility. This capaciousness enabled Tagore's universalism, Aurobindo's mysticism, Gandhi's ethical politics and Ambedkar's constitutional imagination to coexist within one intellectual horizon. In this milieu, Vande Mataram emerges as an invocation rather than a command. The mother it salutes is not a theological deity but a metaphor for land, nurture and belonging. Bankim's imagery springs from the Shakta tradition but is equally shaped by Bengal's syncretic cultural world, where Islamic, Vaishnava and Shakta sensibilities met with ease. Calling this "idolatry" imposes a rigid lens alien to Indic devotional logic. This is an error that Muslim revolutionaries such as Ashfaqullah Khan or Shafi Imam did not make. They heard in the song a call to a shared national purpose. The Congress decision in 1937 to limit the song to two stanzas, later cast as secular sensitivity, was in reality a tactical accommodation to the League in a fragile political moment. It marked the beginning of a mode of secularism defined by self-erasure rather than confident inclusiveness. Over time, this defensiveness hardened, leading to this strange moment where a party that once proudly sang Vande Mataram now hesitates to defend it. What stands out in the present controversy is how certain opposition parties echo the League's old logic that symbols embedded in Hindu cultural experience are inherently exclusionary. This view misconceives a civilisation where traditions have always flowed into one another. By reviving colonial categories that divided Indians into rigid theological compartments, such objections misread both history and the nation's cultural terrain. Vande Mataram's divinity is metaphorical, maternal and ecological - the land as giver and witness. Such imagery permeates Sufi poetry, Bhakti traditions, and Sikh scripture. To read the song literally is to flatten a civilisation's symbolic richness. India's spiritual traditions have always blurred the boundary between sacred and civic. Freedom struggle drew strength from this porousness. Gandhi's Ramrajya was ethical, not sectarian. Tagore's Bharat Tirtha imagined a confluence of cultures. Nehru saw the Ganga as both river and idea. Vande Mataram fits naturally into this lineage of belonging. This is why the current moment offers an opportunity for intellectual recovery, not triumphalism. Bringing the song's 150-year legacy back into conversation is a reminder that national symbols should not be reduced to partisan markers. The opposition must recognise that reflexive contrarianism is not principle. In distancing itself from Vande Mataram, it distances itself from the very cultural inheritance that shaped India's plural republic. If India is to uphold a nationalism worthy of its civilisational heritage, it must acknowledge the spiritual and literary foundations of its freedom struggle, nurture symbols that weave community rather than fracture it, and trust the plural instincts of its people more than the insecurities of its politics. Vande Mataram need not be sung by all, but it deserves to be understood and respected as a vision of the motherland as ideal. Defending the song is not diminishing any community but defending the imagination that enabled India's diverse peoples to dream together. A mature republic must step beyond inherited shadows. Recovering the essence of Vande Mataram is remembering what we aspired to become....