'How dare you?' Defence Minister Rajnath Singh erupts at opposition MPs in Lok Sabha amid 'Vande Mataram' row

Defence Minister Rajnath Singh lost his cool at Oppositions who interrupted him while delivering a blistering speech on 'Vande Mataram' in the Lok Sabha on Monday. Rajnath Singh lashed out at the Congress in his speech for "fragmentation" of the national song 'Vande Mataram' due to its "appeasement politics" that initiated while the former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was in power.

A video surfaced on social media shows that the Opposition MPs asking him to stop. In response, Singh furiously question them: "Kaun baithanewala hai? Kaun baithayega?" (Who is going to make me sit?). Angrily, he asked the Opposition MPs, "Kya baat kar rahe ho...baith! Yeh himmat hogayi?" (What are you even saying? Sit down! How dare you?).

In the video, several BJP leaders can be heard shouting at the oppositions, asking them how they asked the Defence Minister to sit down. Amid this, Singh asked the Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla to intervene. "Restoring the glory of Vande Mataram is the need of the hour and also a demand of morality. Justice that should have been done to 'Vande Mataram' did not happen, and unequal treatment was given to the national anthem and the national song," Singh said in the Lok Sabha.

Injustice to independent India

He criticised the Congress and said, "The injustice to Vande Mataram was not an isolated incident, but a beginning to the appeasement politics by Congress". He also added that it was not just an injustice to a song but to the people of independent India.

The Defence Minister said it was time to reassess Vande Mataram objectively, emphasising that neither the full song nor the book Anand Math was “anti-Islam.” Instead, he noted that they expressed public sentiment against the Nawab of Bengal and British colonial rule.

"Now is the time for an unbiased evaluation of Vande Mataram and its history. Everyone has heard the first two stanzas of Vande Mataram, but many are not familiar with the rest. Most parts of the original version have been forgotten, and those stanzas depict the essence of India," he said.