All six stanzas of Vande Mataram to get the spotlight in Culture Ministry’s Republic Day tableau

This year’s Republic Day parade will include a tableau celebrating 150 years of Vande Mataram, which will feature a moving tractor bearing the complete manuscript of the song, including all six original stanzas, not just the two later adopted as India’s national song.

This follows an acrimonious debate on Vande Mataram in Parliament last month, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi accused the Congress of “betraying” and “sabotaging” the song by removing “crucial verses”, thus sowing the seeds for the country’s partition. The Congress Working Committee of 1937 had adopted a resolution “recognis[ing] the validity of the objections raised by Muslim friends to certain parts of the song” and deciding that only the first two stanzas would be adopted as the national song.

The Culture Ministry’s tableau will also feature a composition of Vande Mataram sung by young people, inspired by the Vishnupant Pagnis version reversing the order of the song to highlight the excluded stanzas. “The recording in Raag Sarang became an act of artistic resistance against colonial censorship,” says a concept note shared by the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts (IGNCA), which has curated the tableau.

The tractor in the tableau will be followed by folk artistes from India’s four directions, embodying cultural plurality, said IGNCA member secretary Sachidanand Joshi.

Band performances

According to an earlier government statement, ‘150 years of Vande Mataram’ is the theme of Republic Day Parade 2026. A series of paintings created by Tejendra Kumar Mitra in 1923, illustrating the verses of Vande Mataram, will be displayed as view-cutters along Kartavya Path during the parade.

Pan-Indian band performances on the theme will be organised till January 26 by the Indian Army, Indian Navy, Indian Air Force, Indian Coast Guard, and other Central Armed Police Forces.

The performance venues will also include the ancestral home and birthplace of the song’s writer Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay at Naihati district, West Bengal.