Hindu nationalists have seized a new battlehorse. This time, they have in their sights the very name of their country: India could in fact be replaced by Bharat, a Sanskrit term taken from the Purana, these sacred texts, pillars of Hinduism. In recent weeks, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has continued to increase its attempts. A few days ago, a committee responsible for revising school social sciences curricula, for example, recommended replacing the term “India” with “Bharat” in secondary school textbooks.
Enough to rekindle a controversy which caused a stir at the beginning of September. On the occasion of the G20 summit, organized in New Delhi, the invitations to the official dinner sent by the head of state, Droupadi Murmu, were signed “president of Bharat”. This unusual formula caused controversy. Did the government intend to abandon the country’s English name? At the opening of the summit, Narendra Modi sent another signal by delivering his speech behind a plaque stamped Bharat rather than India.
Reflecting its thousand-year-old history and its cultural identity, the names to designate India have always been multiple. At the time of the country’s independence, Indians used “India”, “Bharat” or “Hindustan”. And when article 1 of the Constitution was written in 1949, the choice was debated. The Constituent Assembly finally decided on the following formula: “India, that is to say Bharat…”.
But for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, Modi’s party), “India” would refer to a symbol of colonial slavery. “It is absurd that those who once collaborated with the British would question the patriotism of those who wrote the Constitution and fought against colonial oppression,” notes Aditya Mukherjee, professor of history at Jawaharlal University. Nehru, in New Delhi.
The term “India” appeared well before the colonial era
Today, Hindu nationalists want at all costs to erase the vestiges of British colonization, as well as the legacy of the Mughal emperors, the Muslim leaders who ruled the subcontinent from 1526 to 1761. “Pieces of ‘history’ which are not to the taste of the BJP, which wants to make multicultural India a Hindu nation. Since coming to power in 2014, the BJP has Hinduized city names referring to the country’s Muslim past and avenue names that hark back to the colonial era. These changes are part of the same desire to assert the supremacy of the Hindu majority (80% of the population).
But the historical reality is more complex. Because the term “India” appeared well before the colonial era. “Ministers calling the word India foreign have no understanding of our civilization,” says Ashutosh, author of a book on Hindu extremism. For this former journalist, the first traces of the word date back to Alexander the Great, in the 4th century BC. It designated “all those who lived on the banks of the Sindhu (Indus) river or beyond”.
“India is what it is precisely because it has absorbed so many influences throughout the ages,” says Aditya Mukherjee. “The term ‘Hindu’ itself comes to us from Iran. If you want to delete all words of foreign origin, half of our language will disappear!” In addition, a large part of the country does not use the term Bharat, particularly in the South, where the populations are not Hindi-speaking.
Why, then, absolutely want to make this substitution, knowing that the two denominations are officially mentioned in the Constitution? “The BJP is creating a controversy whose sole objective is to distract people from the real problems – unemployment, loss of individual freedoms and increasing poverty,” accuses Aditya Mukherjee. In New Delhi, it is also rumored that the opposition’s decision to create an alliance last July encouraged the government to accelerate the change of name of the subcontinent. Because the acronym of the new “Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance” is, precisely, INDIA. Or India in English.
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