Vote’s in a name?

In our country, the names of geographical locations have always been monuments to political ambition. The clash of civilisations between Mayawati, the bahujan messiah, and Priyanka, the Congress princess, over the renaming of Amethi shows that sycophancy still has an important constituency. While the Congress wants Amethi to be called ‘Rajiv Gandhi Nagar’, BSP leader and chief minister of UP, Mayawati, has decided to call it ‘Chatrapati Sahuji Maharaj Nagar’. Not to be outdone, the former prince of Amethi and BJP MP has asserted that the most appropriate name is ‘Maharaja Rananjay Singh Nagar’.

The naming of Amethi is only the latest episode in the renaming saga in which past and sometimes colonial nomenclature is made to quit India and restored to more immediate political deities. Keeping in view the Chhatrapati Shivaji airport in Mumbai, the Netaji Subhas Bose terminus in Kolkata, the Veer Savarkar airport at Port Blair and other post-colonial innovations such as the renaming of New Delhi’s Connaught Place as Indira Gandhi Chowk and Rajiv Chowk, we may safely conclude that we will soon be chowk-a-block with indigenous heroes. The question inevitably aries: how indigenous do names have to be? Already there are demands to rename Allahabad as Prayag, soon Ahmedabad too might be deemed unfit as the chief metro of Hindu rashtra. Even if it is assumed that the chief minister of UP wishes to wrest Amethi from the suvarna babalog of the Congress, perhaps she might be persuaded to heed the Shakespearean dictum that there really is nothing in a mere name and to truly draw Amethi away from upper caste clutches and return it to the bahujan samaj, she will have to do a little more than engage in brahmanical naming ceremonies.

She might turn her attention to the other namesakes of the re-naming movement. Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai continue as they always were, their regionally sovereign names have made not a jot of difference to the urban woes of the citizenry. It is also doubtful whether aircraft are landing at Port Blair with the tail wind divinely enhanced simply because the airport has become newly Hindu. As for New Delhi, residents continue to invoke the name of the Duke of Connaught rather than the Congress chieftains when circling the plaza. Thus re-naming places in order to further political manifestos has little effect on the public. Mayawati’s anxious campaign is only a case of futile name calling.