The invitation card for the G-20 gala dinner, tonight in New Delhi, is signed by Droupadi Murmu, “president of Bharat”. Not from India. Something that has made rivers of ink flow. For a certain nationalism, India is a foreign and unworthy name for a nation that has been emancipated for three quarters of a century and is the heir to a millennia-old civilization. As much as the Latin name has as much tradition as Africa, Asia or Arabia.
Droupadi Murmu is an adivasi or aboriginal from the Santal tribe, one of the largest in India. Her people remained impervious for four thousand years to the invasions that from the northwest forged the caste system and languages of the north of the country.
Many Santhals remain animists, but Murmu years ago embraced the Brahma Kumaris' version of Hinduism, contributing to its spread among his own people, in competition with Christian evangelizers. The very party that rewarded her for it with her election – Narendra Modi's – could be behind this Bharat. But it could also be an excess of zeal on the part of the head of state.
In any case, some want to believe that the term India would have its days numbered, in favor of a Sanskrit word that can only define the current Indian state with a shoehorn. If they believe it, it is because it has already happened with many more than consolidated place names, but which were not liked by the BJP.
Recent examples of false Sanskritization are Gurugram instead of Gurgaon, Allahabad instead of Prayagraj or Faizabad instead of Ayodhya. Note the particular allergy to names with Muslim roots.
Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar, who has been ambassador to Beijing and Washington, sees no problem in India and Bharat living side by side.
The problem with the latter being imposed is that Indians would have to stop being Indians and become Bharathi, Bharathi or something worse. Bharat, furthermore, marries poorly with peripheral ethnic realities, clearly inherited from the expansion of British India and not from a millennia-old Brahminical solar.
India is named after the Indus River, which rises in China, ends in Pakistan and barely crosses Indian territory, in Ladakh. Even Ali Jinnah complained about New Delhi's appropriation of India's name. After all, if his co-religionists invented Pakistan it was as a reply to Hindustan, the colloquial name of the country in vernacular languages. Absolutely no one says Bharat.
