Modi’s crusade to change India’s name is nothing more than a cynical political gimmick

Whenever he’s found himself on the back foot during his nine-year tenure as India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi has tended to hunker down in that last refuge of scoundrel leaders everywhere: nationalism.

But with less than a year to go before a general election that might well send him packing, Modi finds himself confronting a peculiar challenge. India’s disparate opposition parties have not only managed to come together on a common platform, but have named their coalition “INDIA”. The acronym is short for the awkwardly contrived “Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance”. “INDIA will now defeat Modi,” they said.

Modi spent a few weeks railing against the clever acronym. He tried expanding it into a less appealing expression. He tried suggesting that even terrorist organisations have used the word “India” in their name, so it’s no big deal. None of this worked, so he has now upped the ante by officially devaluing India as the country’s name in favour of “Bharat”, as the country is called in Hindi.

What began as a sly move – a subtly altered VVIP invitation card – has now emerged as a conscious political statement, with Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders not just insisting on using “Bharat” instead of “India” but also deriding the latter as a “British colonial legacy”, which of course it is not.

A few years ago, the Modi government itself rejected calls to formally drop “India” as the country’s name. But today, for reasons of political expediency, the battle lines have been drawn between the two names – and actors, businesses, sportspersons and others are coming under pressure to line up behind “Bharat”.

Of course, in constitutional and legal terms as well as in relation to popular parlance, this debate is foolish.

In English, Tamil (In-di-ya), and some Indian languages, the name of the country is “India”. Hindi, Marathi, and many other languages use “Bharat”. Urdu and Kashmiri speakers tend to say “Hindostan” (a variance on “Hindustan”). These names are interchangeable depending on the language you are speaking, and it is not uncommon to hear two or even all three of these names in public speeches and everyday conversations.

Article 1 of the constitution recognises both India and Bharat, and the official convention has been to use either name, depending on the language being spoken/written. In formal documents such as the official Gazette (where government notifications are printed), both are used, in the roman and nagari scripts respectively.

This is surely the rational, respectful way to use the country’s name. Mixing them up, as the Modi government is now doing – for example, referring to the Dear Leader as “prime minister of Bharat” – makes no sense. The Chinese do not write “president of Chunghwa” in English. The Hungarians do not write “president of Magyarorszag”.

Playing Bharat against India is not merely a political gimmick: it also reflects the BJP’s lack of confidence in its power and – dare I say – patriotism. It is well known that the political forefathers of the BJP did not take part in the freedom struggle against the British. The only way they think they can overcome this problematic legacy is to run down the actual freedom fighters as lackeys of the British (for retaining the use of English and, now, not junking the name “India”) and as “appeasers” of Muslims – the real and perpetual target for Hindu chauvinists for more than a century now.

How far will Modi go with his name game? Dropping “India” altogether would require a constitutional amendment that he may not be able to push through without alienating the many parts of the country that use the name “India” in their own languages. Either way, we can be sure he will use the question of Bharat vs India in his fight against the opposition. Even if this means that his country and its people lose a sense of identity they have cultivated for decades and more.

Siddharth Varadarajan is founding editor of The Wire