RENAMING INDIA WOULD BE INSANE:

India’s rulers are apparently unhappy with the country’s name and appear determined to do away with it altogether. They would prefer it if everyone — not just in India but across the rest of the world — used the name “Bharat” when referring to it. Changing India’s name is political madness, amounting to nothing more than a divisive ploy dreamt up by Hindu nationalists for short-term gain.

Rumors of an imminent name change have been flying after official invites for the G20 summit asked leaders to join the “president of Bharat” for dinner. Officials also used the term in a handbook — called “Bharat, The Mother of Democracy” — issued to foreign delegates heading to the summit. A further clue came when a senior spokesman for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) tweeted that the country’s leader, Narendra Modi, was attending a summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Indonesia as the “prime minister of Bharat.”

“Bharat” is a Sanskrit term for India found in ancient Hindu scriptures, written about 2,000 years ago. The word also means “India” in Hindi. Yet the traditional name “India” also has deep roots, tracing its origins to the river Indus, as well as terms commonly used to refer to the subcontinent for many centuries, stretching as far back as the ancient Greeks.

Modi is simply attempting to do a macro level what Bal Thackeray did on a micro level in the 1990s. As Kevin Williamson wrote in his 2019 book, The Smallest Minority:

I lived for a while in Bombay, which we apparently are now supposed to call “Mumbai.” Do you know why we’re supposed to call it that? Because Bombay has long been governed by an actual fascist political party called Shiv Sena, or Shivaji’s Army, Shivaji being the Hindu hero who turned back the Muslim invaders and saved his Hindu kingdom from what right-wing Hindu nationalists describe as Abrahamic pollution. (Yes, they hate the Muslims, but they’re none too keen on Jews and Christians, either.) Shiv Sena in the 1990s was led by a daft newspaper cartoonist named Bal Thackeray, who liked to pose for photographs with tigers and palled around with Michael Jackson. He set about purging not only English but also Hindi names for local institutions and landmarks, insisting on the regional language, Marathi. Hence, “Mumbai.” But if you ask a “Mumbai” taxi driver to take you to Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus Railway Station, he’ll look at you funny, because he still calls it “Victoria Terminus.”

Everyone in the DNC-MSM quickly made the leap to calling the city “Mumbai” though. Hopefully Modi won’t have similar success.