India vs. Bharat: An 'imaginary political construct' devoid of real divisions

NEW DELHI – Months ahead of crucial national elections, India is engulfed in a heated debate on whether the country should be called ‘Bharat’, a Sanskrit word preferred by Hindu cultural-nationalists to the English variant.

While the government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi has not indicated any official change in the country’s name, many officer-bearers of the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party and its sympathisers, have started pitching for Bharat, in place of India, after invites to a G-20 summit dinner hosted by President Droupadi Murmu referred to her as the ‘President of Bharat’.

The ‘President of India’ has been the traditional usage so far. Adding fuel to the fire, a ruling party spokesperson shared a document of Modi’s upcoming visit to Indonesia that referred to him as the ‘Prime Minister of Bharat’.

The controversy comes days after 28 Opposition parties who have united against Modi under the acronym INDIA (Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance) resolved to contest the 2024 general elections together. Opposition party leaders accused the ruling Modi government of engineering the controversy of ‘Bharat Vs India’ to polarise public opinion and deflect public attention from burning issues such as inflation, unemployment, crony capitalism and misuse of investigative agencies to hound political opponents and citizens. These are attempts by the government to undermine the name of the Opposition alliance, they say. Jairam Ramesh, a senior Opposition member of parliament, accused the Modi government of trying to “distort history” and divide India.

There is a bit of history and politics both here.

India and Bharat are both constitutionally valid names for the country, often used interchangeably. Bharat is preferred in Hindi while India is used in the global arena and in English. Article 1 of the Constitution of the country says, “India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States.” Politicians and commentators have often used the ‘India vs Bharat’ idiom to reflect the disparities between two geographical and cultural identities within the country. For them ‘Bharat’ refers to the rural, provincial backward regions of the country grappling with lack of development and caught up in tradition and ancient culture. India for them is the ever-urbanising, modern, English-speaking and globalised urban space.

However, for the past few decades Hindu nationalists who refer to India as a Hindu nation, have been demanding that only the name Bharat be used to describe the country. It is an ancient name derived from Hindu mythology based on an imagined and unified cultural past. The Hindu nationalists argue that the name India, which denotes the land’s connection with the Indus valley civilisation, was a British construct imposed upon the country during colonial times.

The current debate on calling India as Bharat was triggered by Mohan Bhagwat, the head of the Hindu nationalist organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh that is the ideological fountain head of the ruling BJP of Modi. Bhagwat urged people to use Bharat instead of India in public parlance. With the Modi government convening a special session of Parliament later this month, the agenda for which is a mystery, there is heightened speculation in the country’s media on the government possibly dropping the name India.

“Our country has been known as ‘Bharat’ for ages. Whatever may be the language, the name remains the same,” Bhagwat said recently.

His comments reflect the Hindu nationalist agenda of reclaiming the Hindu identity of the country and shed baggage of long periods of British colonialism and rule by Muslim emperors, especially the Mughals. In the last few years, the BJP has changed the names of several places bearing an Islamic identity and replaced them with names linked to Hindu mythology. The city of Allahabad set up by Akbar was renamed Prayagraj and Faizabad as Ayodhya. More recently, the government replaced the word Indian with ‘Bharatiya’ as it reframed three important British-era laws dealing with law and order and justice in the country.

In the upcoming general elections, the BJP and its alliance partners (National Democratic Alliance or NDA) are facing the challenge of the Congress party-led INDIA bloc. Rahul Gandhi, a Congress MP and one of Modi’s main challengers, says the INDIA bloc represents 60 percent of the country’s population. “If the parties on this stage unite it is impossible for the BJP to win an election,” he said in Mumbai recently.

Modi and his allies enjoy a huge majority in the lower house of Indian Parliament, occupying over 330 seats out of 545. Observers feel the Opposition picked a smart acronym for themselves to blunt the ruling party’s tendency to label its opponents as anti-nationals and question their patriotic credentials. Soon after the Opposition parties formed the INDIA bloc, Modi, while speaking in Parliament, used a disapproving term ‘ghamandiya’ for them. Ghamandiya is the Hindi word for arrogant and has a similar sound to it like INDIA. Modi also compared the main Opposition party Indian National Congress to the East India Company and Muslim organisations Indian Mujahideen and Popular Front of India which have been outlawed for alleged links to terrorism, because they shared the name India.

Sympathisers of the ruling BJP have since joined in the chorus. “We are Bhartiyas, India is a name given by the British & it has been long overdue to get our original name ‘Bharat’ back officially,” Virendra Sehwag, a retired cricketer and one of the most popular sportspersons the country has produced, posted on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Dharmendra Pradhan, a minister of education in the Modi government, said the use of word Bharat in official invites should have happened much earlier and hailed it as a big statement to “come out of colonial mindset.” “Bharat is our identity. We are proud of it,” he told the government’s official media agency ANI.

An artificial construct

Political experts say the timing of the controversy does suggest an electoral motive but also points to a larger goal of the Hindu right-wing.

“Choosing Bharat over India at this moment amounts to casting doubts about the patriotic credentials of the opposition, to depict them as elite and disconnected from the ‘real’ India the BJP claims to represent,” noted political scientist Gilles Verniers told TRT World.

“But the idea of imposing Bharat over India is also grounded into a deeper vision nurtured by Hindu nationalists, who seek to divide the population between ‘authentic’ and ‘dubious’ citizens,” he added.

Calling the debate “unnecessary,” Verniers further said the division between India and Bharat was “an imaginary political construct that does not reflect real divisions among people.”

The RSS-led Hindu right-wing has for long treated the country as a mother, Bharat Mata, and terms such as ‘Akhand Bharat’ (unified India covering the Indian subcontinent) have been a part of its lexicon. The RSS and its affiliates use Bharat in its documents, statements and public speeches.

However, senior author Dhirendra K Jha, says the RSS started referring to the country as Bharat only after the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948, when it faced severe backlash. Till then they had preferred the word ‘Hindu-sthan’ or land of Hindus.

“But after Gandhi’s assassination, they started using the phrase Bharat Varsh as the phrase Hindu Rashtra (Nation of Hindus) had become controversial,” said Jha, author of several books on the genesis of Hindu supremacism. “Their attachment to the word Bharat is a tactical one and not natural.”

Opposition parties have also pointed to the hypocrisy of the ruling government to suddenly prefer Bharat over India. Ever since coming to power in 2014, the Modi government has launched several schemes named after India-- Digital India, Start Up India, New India and others. In 2004, when the BJP was in power, it launched a campaign called ‘Shining India’ to showcase its achievements.

Critics are pointing out all the contradictions centered around the BJP’s newest manoeuvre, insisting that the four letter word India has “incalculable brand value” that has been built over centuries.