Give correct dates of centenaries of Vande Matram and Satyagrah :

New Delhi, Sep 12 (UNI) Angered by the flip flop of the Congress on the date of the centenary celebrations of the national song on September 7, the BJP today asked the Congress to tell the nation the exact dates of the centenaries of the national song and the satyagrah of Mahatma Gandhi to dispel confusion among the people.

BJP General Secretary Vinay Katiyar in an interview to UNI, said it was good that the Congress had admitted its mistake on the date chosen for Vande Matram centenary and it would be better to own the mistakes of its President for skipping the centenary celebrations. ''The attempts of the Congress to defend the absence of its President Sonia Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the pretext that they were not aware of the exact date of the centenary of the national song would not go well before the people,'' he said.

''It was a plan hatched by the Congress to raise the Vande Matram issue and make their own leaders abstain from it and woo the minority votes,'' he alleged.

Mr Katiyar said it was part of history that Vande Matram was composed by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay in 1875 and was included in his novel 'Ananda Math' in 1882. The song was first sung by Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore in a Congress meeting in Calcutta and later under his guidance recited, in toto, at the 1905 AICC session. Father of the nation Mahatma Gandhi had said that this song would be the song of the freedom fighters and it was not the song of any godess but in priase of the mother land.

Mr Katiyar said the whole country had accepted Vande Matram as the national song till 1923 and famour classical singer Vishnu Digambar Paluskar was regularly singing the whole song at all important Congress meetings, till Maulana Mohammad Ali criticised the practice.

He said the the current problem was because of the inability of the Congress to explain the meaning of the national song nor the present generation interested in understanding the importance.

''Hence the country is facing terrorism and violence,'' he added.

''When an Islamic Republic like Bangladesh can have its national anthem which refers to the mother land five times without being questioned, why should the same community oppose praising the mother land in India?'' Mr Katiyar queried.

UNI AU/MCN VD KN1946