In August 2018, India's Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) government renamed the historic Mughalsarai Junction Railway Station in the state of Uttar Pradesh after the right-wing Hindu ideologue Deen Dayal Upadhyaya, most likely because the existing name referred to the Indian Muslim Mughal dynasty.
Renaming places, re-writing histories
Renaming of cities, streets or landmarks is not an act exclusive to India or the BJP.
The city that was known as St Petersburg in imperial Russia was renamed Petrograd in 1914 at the start of World War I because authorities thought its original name sounded too German. In 1924, following the formation of the USSR and the death of Lenin, the name of the city was changed once again, this time to Leningrad. The city's name was reverted back to St Petersburg in 1991, following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Renaming of a place appears a lot more acceptable to the local population when it is done to erase remaining symbols of colonialism. However, when it is done solely to privilege one of the many available readings of a place's history and identity, it becomes a divisive force, helping to accentuate political, social and historic divisions within a community.
Names should be inclusive
The renaming of places assumes extra significance in a diverse country like India. The government and civil society need to make sure that our cultural landscapes contain names, symbols, languages, and scripts that belong to all the different castes, religious communities, and other groups of the country, so all Indians can genuinely feel at home in their homeland.
Claiming that the Mughal rule was colonial, as many Indians do, is not only historically wrong - for it displays an incorrect understanding of colonialism - but it is also divisive. As Irfan Ahmad argues, unlike the British, the Mughals did not use the wealth of India to invest in the place they came from; instead, they became an integral part of India's diverse culture. Muslims are people of this country and not outsiders. They should be treated as such.
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