SC notice on pleas challenging law mandating Vande Mataram

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Tuesday, October 27, agreed to examine fresh petitions challenging the law mandating the singing of all six stanzas of Vande Mataram.

A bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V Mohana issued notice to the Centre and others on pleas filed by Bhimrao Duryodhan Borkar and former IAS officer Balakrishnan Sathyabhama Mavoji.

The top court tagged the petitions with similar pleas and posted the matter for hearing on November 30.

Borkar has argued in his plea that the orders of the Ministry of Home Affairs dated January 28 and July 9, 2026, illegally replace the 79-year-old practice of singing a standalone, non-theistic two-stanza poem with the full version containing “explicit anti-Muslim invective”.

“Under the guise of providing directions on the playing and singing of an ‘official version’… the impugned orders repealed the existing National Song… and imposed a new National Song which is the six-stanza civil war song of Anandamath with its unconstitutional idolatrous and Islamophobic content,” the plea submitted.

Mavoji contended that installing the six-stanza version as the national anthem is an attempt to convert India into a divine sectarian theistic state.

A “conscientious objector” should not be punished for refusing to sing Vande Mataram, the top court had told the Centre on September 22 while asking it to keep in mind a 1986 judgment protecting children who said no to singing the national anthem on grounds of conscience.

The bench was at that time hearing a petition by Carnatic vocalist T M Krishna challenging the law mandating singing of all six stanzas of Vande Mataram, arguing that the last four verses violate the secular character of the nation.

Seeking the Centre’s response on the plea, the bench had said it would expect the principle laid down by the apex court’s 1986 judgment in Bijoe Emmanuel vs State of Kerala to govern the amended law.

In that case, the court protected schoolchildren who respectfully declined to sing the national anthem on grounds of conscience.

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