AN ACRONYM AND A COUNTER

AS THE RULING BJP'S 'BHARAT' MOVE CROSSES SWORDS WITH THE OPPOSITION'S 'INDIA' ALLIANCE, ALL EYES ARE ON THE BIG PRIZE-THE 2024 GENERAL ELECTION

- KAUSHIK DEKA with ANILESH S. MAHAJAN

On September 5, an invitation went out for an official G20 summit dinner hosted by President Droupadi Murmu where she was described as the 'President of Bharat' instead of the President of India'. The same day, a government leaflet on Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to the 20th summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Jakarta referred to him as the Prime Minister of Bharat. At the summit, too, he talked about Bharat's connect with Asia.

Even at the G20 summit, Modi sat behind a placard that read Bharat. A government booklet brought out for the event, titled 'Bharat-The Mother of Democracy', read: 'In Bharat that is India, the view or the will of the people in governance has been a central part of life since earliest recorded history.' This description was the inverse of what Article 1 of the Constitution states: 'India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States.'

These developments sparked off a war of words between the ruling BJP and Opposition parties amid speculation that the Centre was planning to change the official name of the country from India to Bharat. That the government has convened a special session of Parliament (September 18-22) without announcing the agenda added fuel to the speculation. Government sources, though, have dismissed such "rumours".

But the rumours had their roots in a narrative set by the leaders of the BJP and its ideological fountainhead, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The RSS has tagged the term Bharat into the title of many of its affiliates and two days before the president's dinner invite, its chief Mohan Bhagwat reiterated the same at a meeting in Guwahati. He called on the people to stop using the name India and switch to Bharat.