The five-day special session of Parliament is set to begin on September 18, and there is much anticipation about the possibility of the government making a big decision. After Union Carbide and “One Nation, One Election,” there is another conjecture, pointing to an official change in the name of our nation from “India” to “Bharat” through a constitutional amendment under Article 368.
Article 1 of the Indian Constitution states that our country is “India, i.e. Bharat” and is a “union of states”. The name was decided by the Constituent Assembly after much debate as some members wanted the name India and others wanted to keep it Bharat.
The government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi has announced several times that it is leaning towards the name ‘Bharat’. During his Independence Day speech in 2022, Prime Minister Modi asked citizens to take some pledges including eliminating traces of slavery. Changing the name from India to Bharat can be a symbolic gesture towards embracing our nation’s cultural identity.
Rumblings about the expectation are borne out by two incidents – one of them being Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma’s recent post on X (formerly Twitter) who said “Republic of Bharat – happy and proud that our civilization is marching forward boldly towards Amrit Kaal.”
Secondly, the official dinner invitation of the G20 delegation from Rashtrapati Bhawan stated that the President was ‘President of Bharat’ instead of ‘President of India’. Congress leader Jairam Ramesh responded to the changes in the dinner invitation and said that the news of the name change rings true.
“So the news is indeed true. Rashtrapati Bhawan has sent out an invitation to attend the G20 dinner on September 9 in the name of ‘President of Bharat’ instead of the usual ‘President of India’. Now, Article 1 of the Constitution could read: ‘Bharat shall be , which was India, was a union of states. But even this ‘union of states’ is now under attack,” said Jairam Ramesh.
The demand to change the name of the country from India to Bharat has been raised several times, and people like Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) Mohan Bhagwat have also supported the idea. This move is likely to be described as another attempt to move away from the colonial legacy.
Notably, the change may come at a time when the 28-member opposition bloc that plans to fight the 2024 Lok Sabha elections together is called the Inclusive Indian National Democratic Alliance (INDIA). This development may lead to the creation of a new set of hostilities between the government and the opposition.