A bill mandating Vande Mataram cleared the Lok Sabha during the 2026 monsoon session — and AIMIM president Asaduddin Owaisi wasted no time firing back, directing his sharpest criticism not at the ruling dispensation but at India's first President, Rajendra Prasad, accusing him of making a 'big mistake' at the founding moment of the republic.

Owaisi's charge against a founding father

Owaisi's post declared that Rajendra Prasad had committed a 'big mistake' — 'badi galti' — a pointed reference to the 1950 Constituent Assembly decision that designated Vande Mataram as the national song while reserving the status of national anthem for Jana Gana Mana. By naming Prasad, the AIMIM chief is arguing that the ambiguity built into that founding settlement has now been weaponised by legislation decades later.

The distinction mattered then, and it matters now. Objections to compulsory singing of Vande Mataram — rooted in the song's origins in Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's novel Anandamath and its imagery that some Muslim scholars consider incompatible with Islamic monotheism — were precisely why the Constituent Assembly drew a careful line between song and anthem in the first place. Owaisi's argument is that Prasad should have drawn that line more firmly.

Why a Lok Sabha vote reignites a 75-year debate

Legislative attempts to give Vande Mataram a more binding, mandatory status have surfaced periodically over the decades, each time colliding with the same constitutional fault lines around secularism and religious freedom. The 2026 monsoon session bill — its precise provisions not yet fully in the public domain — appears to have cleared the lower house, setting up a potential Rajya Sabha battle and, almost certainly, legal challenges.

For AIMIM, a party that has built its identity around representing Muslim political interests in Parliament, this is precisely the kind of symbolic-but-consequential legislation it exists to contest. Owaisi's framing — blaming a Congress-era founding father rather than only the current government — is a deliberate rhetorical move: it widens the target and signals that the objection is constitutional, not merely partisan.

What comes next in Parliament and the courts

The bill now faces the Rajya Sabha, where the arithmetic is different and opposition coordination will be tested. If it clears both houses, implementation orders will determine whether singing is compulsory in schools, government offices, or public events — the details that will decide whether this becomes a live legal controversy. Petitions challenging any mandatory-singing provision would almost certainly reach the Supreme Court, which has previously held that compelling citizens to sing a national song can raise fundamental-rights questions.

Owaisi has put a constitutional argument on the table. The rest of Parliament — and the judiciary — will now have to answer it.