On Monday, a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court issued a timely warning against ahistorical appropriations of the past. Dismissing a PIL that sought the Court’s intervention in restoring the “original names” of places “renamed by barbaric invaders,” the bench said that the “country cannot remain a prisoner of the past”. The petitioner had contended that several roads, public places and cities in the country are named after “foreign looters” and argued that the “benevolent nature of Hinduism had resulted in it being wiped out from Pakistan and Afghanistan”. The bench admonished him for going by the playbook of those who “invoke history selectively” to create “schisms in society”. “You want to keep the country on the boil. Let us not break society with such kinds of petitions,” it said, and observed that such renaming projects take away focus from important governance-related imperatives.
Moves to rename places are rarely innocent of short-term politics. European names, for instance, were grafted onto towns, cities and countries in several parts of the world during the so-called Age of Discovery in the 15th to 18th centuries. Constantinople was renamed Istanbul in 1930, and the urge to reverse colonial legacies led to changes in the names of several places in India immediately after Independence. In recent times, such renaming exercises have become the stock-in-trade of the votaries of identity politics who obsess about “outsiders”, “invaders” and “looters”. The association of such usage with majoritarian politics is unmistakable and the erasure of historical context and nuance in such projects is conspicuous — whether it be the renaming of Aurangzeb Road in Delhi or changing the names of Allahabad and Mughalsarai in Uttar Pradesh. The petitioner to the Supreme Court spoke of Mahmud of Ghazni and Ibrahim Lodhi in the same breath, even though the two medieval kings have vastly different ancestries and are separated by nearly five centuries. “What is the relationship of Aurangzeb, Ghazni and Lodhi with India,” he asked and rued that several places in Delhi are named after these rulers, “but none after the Pandavas”. This failure to come to terms with the past rightly invited the apex court’s censure. “Can you wish away invasions from history? What are you trying to achieve?” it asked.
The apex court concluded by reaffirming the “rule of law, secularism and constitutionalism” and cautioning against bigotry. Its directive to abide by “the principle of fraternity enshrined in the Constitution’s Preamble” and its words of caution against the abuse of history must be heard.
