Bharat naming row: Those seeking to change India name want to hide colonial history, says Rahul Gandhi

In Brussels on Friday, Gandhi had said the India- Bharat controversy was a panic reaction by the government, a “dramatic, new diversion tactic by the Prime Minister to deflect attention from the Adani affair”.

On Saturday, he took it a step further.

“The Constitution actually uses both the names… So I don’t really see a problem there, both words are perfectly acceptable, but I think maybe we irritated the government a little bit because we named our coalition INDIA so that got them all heated up and now they have decided to change the name of the country. You know how these things are. We could always give our coalition a second name as well… so I don’t think it will solve the purpose but people act in strange ways.”

He added: “There is something deeper that is going on, which is that people who want to change the name of anything are basically trying to deny history.”

“The fact of the matter is whether we like it or we don’t like it, we have a history. We were ruled by the British, we fought the British, we defeated the British. I am sure the English don’t like it, but English is spoken by more Indians than English people. It is our language more than theirs and we speak it in our own way. We twist it and we turn it maybe in ways they don’t like. So the English that is spoken in India is actually a different expression that is spoken in England. Embedded in that English is a huge history, a lot of pain, a lot of happiness… imagination, struggle… those things are embedded and the people who want to change the name want to erase that,” he said.

“They don’t want the history of our country known to our future generation. It disturbs them. I believe that we should accept our history. If we were ruled by the British for 100-200 years… okay… we dealt with it and let’s move on,” Rahul said.

Asked where he would place the “role of Hinduism” if the INDIA alliance is elected to power, he said: “I have read the Gita, I have read a number of Upanishads, I have read many Hindu books… There’s nothing Hindu about what the BJP does. There is absolutely nothing. I have not read anywhere… in no Hindu book… from no learned Hindu person have I ever heard that you should terrorise, harm people who are weaker than you.”

“So this idea…this word Hindu nationalists…this is a wrong word. They are not Hindu nationalists. They have nothing to do with Hinduism. They are out to get power at any cost and they will do anything to get power and they will do anything to ensure that the Indian caste structure, the social structure of my country is not threatened. They want dominance of a few people and that is what they are about. There is nothing Hindu about them.”

He said more people from the majority community vote for the opposition than for the BJP. “Sixty per cent of India votes for us and 40 per cent of India votes for them. So this idea that the majority community votes for the BJP is a wrong idea,” he said.