This week, India's President Droupadi Murmu signed a bill that fills a void in the country's legislation that no one had filled for 76 years. The national song is now included in the same Act as the flag, Constitution and national anthem, and thus anyone who deliberately interrupts a performance of Vande Mataram or a gathering in which it is sung faces up to three years in jail, a fine, or both. When someone commits a crime again, they will be given a minimum sentence. Until Tuesday, the protection was missing for the song, but not for Vande Mataram; a heckler could be jailed for interrupting Jana Gana Mana, but not for Vande Mataram. That imbalance has come to an end.

How it's done is as important as the result. A Congress-led opposition group, protesting against police action on students during demonstrations over unrelated issues in the country, staged a walkout in the Rajya Sabha to demand answers to questions on the issue before the bill was passed on voice vote on July 29. It was passed by the Lok Sabha the next day by voice vote amid loud slogans which led to the early adjournment of the House. It was the first bill to pass both houses in this Monsoon Session, which in itself offers an insight into the way the government has spent its early political capital this year. The Union Home Ministry had already announced that all six stanzas of Vande Mataram should be sung in front of the anthem in the Independence Day functions. In a deliberate move, this is the first time Vande Mataram will be sung from the Red Fort at the Independence Day function, and the Home Ministry has directed this to the event of legal reform.

None of this was a coincidence. The government has been working towards this occasion for the past year or more, having started a year-long celebration of the song's 150th anniversary in November, culminating in a 10-hour parliamentary debate in December on which Home Minister Amit Shah directly connected the song's shortness to the Partition trauma. That's the manner in which it has stuck. But over the years, ministers have consistently claimed that removing the song in its first two verses in 1937, to appease religious sensitivities over later verses that reference Durga and Lakshmi, was a historical slight that the current government is now seeking to rectify by law, not just by seizing its assets.

The opposition doesn't object to the song. From the DMK, to the RJD to Trinamool Congress, each party which voiced disapproval of the Bill made sure to state that Vande Mataram had a very significant role in the freedom movement before raising any objection against the procedure. There are three ways of their argument going. Firstly, a legal one that DMK MP A Raja pointed out that the government has twisted the history of the poem, suggesting that it was approved by the entire poem, but Rajendra Prasad's statement in 1950 and the Congress statement, prior to it, didn't cover the first two stanzas. Second, a federal one: the song is required to be sung at official occasions in the state assemblies, and the bill's content brings to mind some regional parties' concerns about state autonomy, especially as West Bengal is heading into elections and the song originated in Bengal. Third, a civil-liberties one, was most forcefully put by RJD's Manoj Jha, who questioned in the Rajya Sabha whether reverence could be codified, and whether a student's protest chant from the 1980s would now be considered an actionable insult. In response to such opposition, the government has been straightforward, not legalistic, and made it clear that support for statutory protection of the song meant giving succour to secessionist sentiments, which was expected to sharpen the divide rather than create one.

Remove the parliamentary theatrics and there's a wider message to be read. When governments want to assert their cultural confidence in public, they turn to symbolic legislation, flag, anthem laws, blasphemy-adjacent laws.When governments wish to project their cultural confidence outwards, they turn to symbolic legislation, flag, anthem laws, blasphemy-adjacent laws. Not so different from any other country, even in France, insulting the Marseillaise and tricolour is a crime, several states in the United States have flag-desecration laws that remain on the books, even though they were largely ignored by the Supreme Court in 1989, and in Turkey, insulting the state is punishable by law. The difference between India's move and others is that it is delivered in a timely manner. It arrives at a time when the country is seeking to establish itself as a swing power in a restructured global economy, and cultivates supply-chain migration away from China, multilateral trade discussions with Washington and Brussels at once, and a global image of a civilisational state with five-thousand-year continuity instead of just a post-1947 republic. A law which would put a song of independence era to the level of the anthem in the statute book is a complete fit into that soft-power rhetoric and in the name of it, a story of cultural sovereignty would also be reinforced at a time when India wishes foreign capitalists and foreign governments to take its institutional confidence seriously.

There's even a domestic economic footnote, one that's easy to overlook, easy to overlook, easy to overlook. Each hour spent on this debate in Parliament was an hour that was not spent on the government's own legislative queue, and pending amendments to labour codes and the insolvency law that have been pushed for by industry bodies since April of the Monsoon Session. Regardless of motive, it seems Kharge's allegation in the Rajya Sabha that the government was using cultural symbolism to deflect attention from issues like jobs, inflation and manufacturing output is politically self-serving. The actual outcome of whether Vande Mataram's new legal status becomes a key element of India's civic life, or it becomes a new flash point for litigation when the first state government enforces it at a Muslim majority institution's function will depend more on the spirit of the law, than its words.