Renaming India: Saffronisation of public spaces

 By renaming cities, streets and airports, the BJP government is trying to erase India's diverse history and identity.

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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Europe: Embracing Immigrants Only in the World Cup Isn’t Good Enough

.......But away from the soccer pitch, the reality is starkly different. As England and Belgium prepared to face each other on Thursday, European leaders gathered in the Belgian capital, Brussels, to discuss a number of issues. Chief among them was migration, as the European Union tries to keep migrants out, hoping to avoid a repeat of 2015, when hundreds of thousands of asylum-seekers arrived at Europe’s shores..... 

......... For immigrants and their descendants in the United Kingdom, the Brexit referendum brought back memories of a not-so-distant past, when black and brown people across the country were conspicuously made to feel unwanted, giving racists carte blanche to spew their hate. “The environment after the referendum has made racial and ethnic minorities more vulnerable to racial discrimination and intolerance,” said Tendayi Achiume, the U.N. special rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance........

..... There is an obvious contradiction in the way Europe treats its immigrants. Not even the most avid xenophobe can deny their contributions to building the continent’s social patrimony in the wake of its wars. Caribbeans and South Asians provided crucial labor to build Britain’s beloved National Health Service when the country was in desperate need of health professionals. In the 1950s, Turkish workers arrived in Germany to fill the demand for cheap labor in a booming post-war economy......

....... As Europe faces an identity crisis, it needs to accept the fact that there are countless Lukakus and Sterlings among us, contributing to every level of society. Embracing immigrants for three weeks when the World Cup comes knocking every four years is just not good enough......

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