NEW DELHI: Terming Congress the “proud flagbearer” of the national song, Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge Friday said ‘Vande Mataram‘, which was first publicly sung by Rabindranath Tagore at Congress session in 1896, awakened the collective soul of the nation and became the rallying cry for the freedom struggle. He alleged RSS never accepted the song and has stuck to its “Namaste Sada Vatsale” despite the national song’s universal reverence. Kharge said the song echoed across the land from the Partition of Bengal in 1905 to the last breaths of the country’s brave revolutionaries, and terrified the British into banning it. He recalled that Mahatma Gandhi in 1915 wrote that ‘Vande Mataram’ had become the “most powerful battle cry among Hindus and Musalmans of Bengal during the Partition days”, while Jawaharlal Nehru said in 1938 that “for more than 30 years now, the song is related directly to Indian nationalism.” Kharge claimed the UP assembly started reciting ‘Vande Mataram’ in 1937. Party spokesman Jairam Ramesh said Sabyasachi Bhattacharya’s definitive biography of ‘Vande Mataram’ gives the background to the CWC resolution of Oct 29, 1937, which adopted ‘Vande Mataram’.