For any enterprise to succeed, ideation and execution have to work together. Execution has nothing to execute if there’s no idea behind it. And an idea, however brilliant, stays a thought on paper unless it’s carried through well. Still, since the idea comes first, the person who conceives it usually earns the higher valuation. Investors have known this for as long as there have been start-ups to fund.
The same logic applies to governance. Good government, in my view, rests on exactly two legs:
· Conceiving and instituting policies that deliver equitable, sustainable, accelerated growth.
· Executing those policies through structured programs, efficient delivery, and honest, timely course-correction.
Judge any government on these two counts, and only these two.
On execution, I’d give the incumbent government a reasonably good score. It has carried forward policies inherited from its predecessor — food security, direct benefit transfer, financial inclusion, FDI in retail, infrastructure push, defence procurement reform, privatization, the manufacturing thrust — and executed them competently. It built out delivery rails — digital payments, GST, the 14th Finance Commission’s recommendations — for ideas that were formulated in the UPA’s last years. And it squeezed real value out of a couple of foundational bets, particularly Aadhaar and digital payments. That execution muscle is a big reason the economy came through Covid and the global slowdown as well as it did, and why UPI is now a genuine export success and road-building runs at a pace India hasn’t seen before.
Ideation is a different story. In twelve-plus years, the list of genuinely new policy ideas is short. Where the government has innovated, the results have been mixed at best — demonetization being the obvious example: a big idea, thin preparation, questionable payoff.
I would put the newly enacted Prevention of Insults to National Honour (Amendment) Act, 2026 in the same bucket. It isn’t going to achieve much of anything constructive, and it carries real potential to disturb public order, hand police another discretionary lever, and generate avoidable litigation and harassment.
The backstory
Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay wrote Vande Mataram; it appeared in Bangadarshan in 1875 and was incorporated into his novel Anandamath in 1882. The Congress sang it at its sessions from 1896 onward. On 24 January 1950, the Constituent Assembly adopted the first stanza of Tagore’s Jana Gana Mana as the National Anthem. Article 51A of the Constitution makes “respecting” the anthem a fundamental duty, and Parliament backed that with teeth via the Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act, 1971, which criminalized disrespect to the Flag, the Constitution and the Anthem.
That same day, Constituent Assembly President Rajendra Prasad made a statement — not a resolution, not a constitutional provision, just a statement — that Vande Mataram’s first two stanzas be honoured equally with the Anthem, with wording changes left for later. The later stanzas, invoking Durga and Lakshmi, were dropped from that honour, partly on the reasoning that overt religious imagery sat awkwardly with a plural republic. The Constitution itself, worth noting, doesn’t mention a “National Song” at all — the status rests entirely on Prasad’s 1950 remarks.
It’s a genuinely unusual arrangement. No other country runs a separate anthem and song; a few, like Denmark and New Zealand, have two anthems of equal standing, which is a different thing altogether.
What the law actually does
What the 2026 Act does is narrower than the noise around it suggests. It doesn’t touch the Constitution — it’s an ordinary statute — and it doesn’t itself declare the full six-stanza composition the official National Song. All it does is extend the 1971 Act’s existing anthem protection (up to three years’ imprisonment for intentionally preventing its singing or disrupting an assembly singing it) to Vande Mataram, citing Prasad’s 1950 statement as its rationale.
Where I think the trouble starts is in how it’s being sold. The government and its supporters have been framing this as conferring National Song status on all six stanzas — when what actually has that status, per Prasad’s own words, is the first two. That framing may not survive judicial scrutiny, but it hands police the discretion to act against citizens who are doing nothing more than honoring the version the Constituent Assembly actually blessed.
The legal exposure
There’s a genuine constitutional exposure here too. The Supreme Court’s Bijoe Emmanuel ruling on the Anthem established that no one can be compelled to sing a national symbol against conscience — only stopped from disrupting others who choose to. A penal provision built around Vande Mataram invites the same challenge on Article 25 religious-freedom grounds. And any attempt to stretch the song’s status toward something constitutionally binding runs into the Basic Structure doctrine from Kesavananda Bharati vs State of Kerala — Parliament can’t amend around secularism, one of the Constitution’s basic features, through the back door.
The groundwork that was never laid
Then there’s the sheer absence of preparation. Unlike the Anthem, which has a government-notified tune, tempo and duration, Vande Mataram has never had an official musical setting — Tagore’s own 1896 tune, Hemant Kumar’s from the film Anandamath, A. R. Rahman’s version, and others have coexisted freely for decades. Nothing in this law fixes that. Which means a constable on the ground, not any statute, effectively decides whether a given rendition counts as respectful — a recipe for selective, motivated enforcement against whoever happens to be inconvenient that day.
And one more data point worth sitting with: per the 2011 Census (language data released only in 2018), just 24,821 people in the then population north of 1.2 billion listed Sanskrit as their mother tongue — the least-spoken of India’s 22 scheduled languages. Only Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand give it second-official-language status. None of that bears directly on the law’s validity, but it’s a reminder of how thin the on-the-ground constituency is for turning a freedom-movement anthem into a criminal-law flashpoint.
There’s a sequencing problem too, and it’s the clearest tell that this was written on the back foot rather than thought through in advance. Back in February 2026, the Home Ministry had already directed that all six stanzas be sung at official events and school assemblies — using the word “may” not “shall” and attaching no penalty. When that directive was challenged, the Supreme Court in March declined to intervene precisely because it was voluntary and toothless. The 2026 Act reads like the fix for that gap — except it still doesn’t define “intentionally prevents” or “causes disturbance”, so the ambiguity the Court flagged hasn’t been resolved, only criminalized. That’s not ideation. That’s patching a loophole after the fact and calling it policy.
The bottom line
None of this required rushed legislating. The Constituent Assembly’s own words already drew the line — first two stanzas, equal honor, details to follow. A government with a genuine appetite for ideation would have used the space “details to follow” left open: notify a tune, define “disrespect”, settle the six-stanza question through consensus rather than executive push. Instead, what we have is a law that recycles a 76-year-old ambiguity, dresses it up as settled history, and leaves the actual grey areas — much like demonetization before it — to be sorted out later, in public, the hard way.
Good execution can carry a government a long way. It can’t make up for an idea nobody thought through.