IN Uttar Pradesh, the Government headed by Ajay Singh Bisht (who styles himself ‘Yogi Adityanath’) is on a name-changing spree. Some time ago, Mughalsarai was renamed ‘Deen Dayal Upadhyay Nagar’. Recently, Allahabad was remanded ‘Prayagraj’ and Faizabad district (named so after Ayodhya’s twin city of the same name) was renamed ‘Ayodhya’. The CM has promised more name changes, declaring that he will not hesitate even to rename the Taj Mahal as ‘Ram Mahal’, and demanding that India be renamed ‘Hindustan’. Following suit, Gujarat CM Vijay Rupani has said he wants to rename Ahmedabad as ‘Karnavati’. A BJP leader has demanded that Agra be renamed ‘Agrawal’; another has promised to rename Hyderabad; and riot-accused BJP MLA Sangeet Som has demanded that Muzaffarnagar be renamed ‘Laxminagar’ since its current name “attracts riots”.
The politics behind these name changes is not hard to recognise. Every name with Mughal/Muslim associations is being replaced with a Hindu-sounding name - in line with the BJP’s fascist vision which insists that India is a Hindu Nation. As Gorakhpur MP, Adityanath declared several names to be changed in the same manner: renaming Urdu Bazaar as Hindi Bazaar, Ali Nagar as Arya Nagar, Miya Bazaar as Maya Bazaar, Islampur as Ishwarpur, and Humayun Nagar as Hanuman Nagar. Likewise, Rajasthan CM Vasundhara Raje had changed the names of “Muslim-sounding” villages - Miyan Ka Bara became Mahesh Nagar, and Ismail Khurd in Jhunjhunu became Pichanwa Khurd. The aim is to erase all symbols and signs of Muslim presence in India, as the Babri Masjid was demolished - and send a message to Muslims that they are interlopers in India.
It is another matter that these name changes display a profound contempt for historical facts and the syncretic nature of any living culture. It is a lie, for instance, that Akbar renamed Prayag as ‘Allahabad’ after Allah. In fact, he created a new city and named it after the syncretic religion he founded: Deen-e-ilahi. When the ideologue of the First War of India’s Independence in 1857, Azimullah Khan, wrote ‘Ham hain iske malik, Hindustan hamara’ (We’re the masters of Hindustan), he used the Persian name for the region near the Sindhu/Indus river. ‘Hindustan’ and the language ‘Hindustani’ always carried this connotation - it is the RSS and BJP which are now trying to change the meaning of the term to mean ‘land of the Hindus.’
Azimullah’s song, widely recognised as India’s first national song, celebrated the anti-colonial unity of people across faiths. Faizabad and Ayodhya were centres of that great anti-colonial war of independence that Hindus and Muslims fought together. The BJP and RSS, which had nothing to do with the freedom struggle, are now trying to vitiate and communalise the ‘Ganga-Jamuni’ syncretic legacy of our country.
The BJP’s urgency to indulge in communal name changing now is motivated by its desperation to stir up communalism and divert people’s attention away from Modi’s lies, scams and betrayals of his tall promises as various Assembly polls and the 2019 Lok Sabha polls approach. The ‘Vikas’ (development) Modi promised is conspicuously missing - and communal politics is the only achievement Modi can claim. So we must be prepared to expose and resist even more vicious and poisonous communal propaganda and violence in the run-up to the 2019 elections.
