In most democratic countries, special parliamentary sessions are only called in times of crisis and are preceded by a vigorous national debate. In India, they are called for no previously declared reasons and are preceded by a vigorous national guessing game.
One of the most notable features of the Narendra Modi regime is how secretive it can be. Nobody—outside of a small, tight circle around the Prime Minister—knows what is happening at the highest levels of government or what is being planned. It is okay to keep the press guessing but the unique feature of this government is that even most ministers have no clue of what to expect.
So the call for a special parliamentary session has left so-called BJP insiders as puzzled as the rest of us. Political reporters who have never got a single thing about the Modi government right—not the timing of reshuffles, not demonetisation; not the selection of Presidential candidates—engage in feverish, if ignorant, speculation while the rest of us wait to see what is coming.
At present, the speculation is that the session will be used to pass bills calling for simultaneous elections at the Centre and the states, or for Women’s Reservation.
Or even that a Uniform Civil Code will be introduced.
Any of those things may still happen. But the latest bout of speculation now says that the government may use the session to change the name of India.
India vs Bharat not new
I am not sure how this would work. The Constitution provides for the use of both Bharat and India. So what can Parliament do? Ban the use of India? That would require a two-thirds majority in both houses and ratification by states. This is not easy to do.
And besides, would you need a special session if all you wanted was to declare that you preferred Bharat to India when the Constitution lets you use both?
The speculation has been fuelled by official invitations that refer to the ‘President of Bharat’ rather than the ‘President of India’ as is the normal practice. Similarly, some documents now refer to the ‘Prime Minister of Bharat’ rather than ‘Prime Minister of India’. Little things like this provoke a Pavlovian response from BJP leaders who rush to hail the switch to Bharat, though, given past precedent, it is not clear whether they have been asked to start tweeting this or whether they are merely anticipating what might happen.
The Bharat vs. India discussion is not new. Till recently it has always been the BJP that celebrates the use of India over Bharat. Atal Bihari Vajpayee lost his party a General Election by telling us that India was shining. Narendra Modi launched Make in India and a host of other programmes that used India rather than Bharat.
It is the Congress regime that started public sector corporations with Bharat in their names: BHEL, BEML, BPCL, BDL etc. When Rajiv Gandhi launched his predecessor to Vajpayee’s ill-starred India Shining, he called it Mera Bharat Mahaan. And more recently, Rahul Gandhi went on a Bharat Jodo Yatra.
And yet, social media is full of halfwits telling us Bharat is the real name of our country and that India was a name given to us by the British.
Of course, this is nonsense. The name India goes back to the times when the British were still living in the trees. It dates back thousands of years when the people of India were known as the people who lived near the Indus river, which was called Sindhu, leading to our people being called Hindus. The same root gave us India. Thousands of years ago, Ptolemy’s map referred to our country as India and Alexander the Great had no doubt he was headed for India.
So, why drag the British into it? If the RSS wants freedom from the legacy of Alexander the Great and wants to end the pernicious influence of such Greek gods as Zeus, Apollo and Aphrodite over us then yes, the demand for Bharat may make a certain amount of sense. But otherwise, the name India is no affront to Hindu pride.
