Marching Ahead or Moving Backward?
BJP’s Politics of Distraction in the Age of Vande Mataram 150
“Nation first” has been the Bharatiya Janata Party’s most repeated slogan since 2014. Yet, as 2025 draws to a close, many citizens are asking a blunt question: when the country is grappling with 8–9% food inflation, a stubbornly high youth unemployment rate (over 16% as per CMIE), farm distress in Punjab and Maharashtra, and a border still simmering in Ladakh, why has the government suddenly decided that the most urgent national priority is a year-long celebration of the 150th anniversary of “Vande Mataram”?
The timing is impossible to ignore.
In the last week of November 2025, Parliament was paralysed for days over the Adani bribery indictment in the United States and allegations of crony capitalism. Farmers were preparing for another 2025’s version of the 2020–21 agitation. Manipur has been burning for over two years with no political resolution in sight. Instead of an emergency winter session to discuss these crises, the ruling party and its vast cultural machinery swung into action: grand plans for Vande Mataram concerts, compulsory singing in schools, commemorative coins, postage stamps, and a ₹400-crore “Vande Mataram Mahotsav” budget.
This is not the first time.
The playbook is now familiar:
- Demonetisation chaos in 2016 → surgical strike celebrations.
- Article 370 fallout and unemployment anger in 2019 → Ram Mandir bhoomi pujan extravaganza.
- Covid second-wave bodies floating in the Ganga in 2021 → Central Vista vanity project and “world’s largest vaccination drive” propaganda.
- Women’s wrestling champions protesting sexual harassment in 2023 → Chandrayaan-3 victory lap and G20 photo-ops.
Every time a governance failure threatens to dominate the news cycle, the BJP-RSS ecosystem produces a high-decibel cultural or nationalist spectacle. The media, especially the pliant Godi channels, dutifully shifts cameras from hungry farmers and jobless graduates to saffron flags and emotional renditions of Bankim Chandra’s poem.
“Vande Mataram” itself is beyond reproach. It is part of our freedom struggle’s sacred legacy. But turning a revolutionary song into a government-sponsored tamasha while actual nation-building tasks—schools, hospitals, jobs, internal security—are neglected is the ultimate irony. When children in government schools are asked to sing the song daily but still sit under trees because classrooms are unfinished, when jawans guard the border with 40 Year-old rifles while crores are spent on light-and-sound shows, the slogan “Vande Mataram” starts sounding hollow.
The BJP’s defenders will say cultural revival is also nation-building. Fair enough. But revival cannot be a substitute for delivery. Celebrating 150 years of a song written in 1875 is fine; what the nation desperately needs in 2025 is a serious plan for the next 25 years—on jobs, federalism, climate resilience, and social harmony. Instead, we are getting orchestrated controversies and sentimental distractions.
In the end, the question is simple: Is the BJP marching the country ahead, or are we moving backward, hypnotised by the beat of cultural drums while the house is on fire?
The answer, sadly, seems increasingly clear.
Sanjay Pattnayak
Sundargarh
