Srinagar, Sept. 5 -- By Farooq Ahmad Khan

Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay's Vande Mataram grew far beyond the novel in which it first appeared, becoming a powerful voice of the freedom struggle and a lasting part of the country's collective memory.

As a song that belongs to the whole nation, the question of which version Indians should sing together calls for accommodation rather than religious or political assertion.

The Congress Working Committee reached that answer once already, in 1937.

Objections had come in about parts of the poem, and the committee drew a line inside it.

The opening two stanzas describe the motherland through rivers, harvests, breezes and moonlight, images any citizen can embrace without hesitation. The stanzas t...