In all the programs related to the G20 summit, President Draupadi Murmu sent invitation cards written as President of India instead of President India. After this BJP leaders and ministers started welcoming it. The message was sent across the country that Modi government wants to name the country only as India, it is against the word India. After this the letter from the Prime Minister of India also came out. On this the opposition started protesting against changing India in this way. The opposition said that since the name of their alliance is India. That’s why the BJP and the central government are scared. But BJP and the central government kept terming this initiative as right. But it is this BJP which in 2004 opposed the proposal of the then Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav in the UP Assembly, in which there was talk of changing the name of India to Bharat. The BJP staged a walkout from the UP Assembly as soon as it was proposed.
A Mint report states that in 2004, Mulayam Singh Yadav’s cabinet passed a resolution that the Constitution should be amended to read ‘Bharat, that is India’ instead of ‘India, that is India’. The then Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav again put this proposal in the state assembly, everyone except BJP accepted it. The BJP staged a walkout even before the resolution was passed.
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Such apprehensions are also arising because the government has not yet released the agenda of this special session and has made it completely confidential. Although the entire opposition, including the Congress, demanded the release of the agenda, but the government has vowed not to reveal the agenda in advance.
Mulayam Singh Yadav’s opposition to English was at its peak at one time. In 2004, with this intention, he brought a proposal to change India from India. Mulayam described himself as a follower of socialist thinker Ram Manohar Lohia. Lohia’s resolve to abandon English was a socialist stance, which Mulayam agreed with.
The Times of India reported at the time that Lohia’s understanding was that English had created a divide between the educated and the illiterate and therefore Hindi should be made the official language instead. At the time of Mulayam, the SP had said in its manifesto – “Our country was always known as Bharat. However, it was named India during the 200 years of British rule.
It is said that in 2014 itself, the then BJP MP Yogi Adityanath had brought a proposal in the Parliament to replace India with only Bharat, but the party gave him some hints. When this proposal came in the House and Yogi Adityanath’s name was called, he was not present. That is, he was not interested in taking this proposal forward. In this way, BJP has had a double stand on India and India since the beginning, but now it wants to present it as nationalism.
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Apart from Article 1 of the Constitution, the word “India” is not mentioned in any other provision of the Constitution as originally drafted in English. Even the Preamble of the Constitution mentions “We the People of India”. Means the constitution also accepted India and the constitution was written in English only. Even today, despite Hindi being the mother tongue of India, English is more prevalent. Of course, Indian corporates are welcoming the name India today but all their business abroad is conducted in the name of the word India.