A political interest plea rightly rejected

The Supreme Court has rightly rejected a public interest litigation (PIL) by lawyer Ashwini Upadhyay seeking the setting up of a ‘renaming commission’ to restore the “original” names of ancient places which were “renamed” by invaders. The petitioner had contended that several roads, public places and cities are named after “foreign looters” and rulers like Aurangzeb, Ghazni and Lodhi, but “none after the Pandavas”. A bench of Justices K M Joseph and B V Nagarathna told the petitioner that a secular democratic republic cannot be held prisoner to its past and that the country cannot wish away a part of its history. They also questioned the petitioner’s motive, saying that an obsession with history would bring alive issues “which would keep the country on boil.” The court also said that such renaming projects took focus away from governance.

It is clear that there was no public interest in the petition and that its demand was born of political interest. It came from a political view of history that excludes anything that does not suit a narrow view of the country’s identity. Many a foreigner has come, but India has evolved by assimilating even the invader and making him its own. The invaders brought with them their ways of life, knowledge, culture, and their names too, all of which became part of the greater Indian story and its history. A part of it cannot be erased and rejected selectively because it is inconvenient to our current politics. A society that shirks from this reality and tries to derive or define its present from a chosen past is doomed to lose its future. Even the chosen past is an imagined and recreated past, which can cater to only a collective nostalgia that can drive populist and delusionary politics. History is not a court where political grievances are settled and the present defeats the past by sending an Aurangzeb to the purgatory or a Tipu Sultan out of the textbook.

As for names, even the words Hindu and Hindustan are not so Indian. Shall we drop them? In any case, even without a renaming commission, names are being changed at will, with the Mughal Gardens becoming Amrit Udyan and Aurangabad turning into Sambhaji Nagar. Though the court said no to a renaming commission, the government can very well set up a ministry for rewriting history and renaming with an expansive brief. Why should the renaming be limited to roads and places and buildings? Maybe the ministry can go about changing the likes of George, Rahim or even Nilofer to make them more Indian, oh no, Bharatiya!