In early September, the G20 Summit was held in India. The summit of about twenty countries meet annually to discuss global issues and strengthen national ties. In preparation, the Indian executive office sent invitations for dinner to all participating countries. However, in the invitation, India was written as “Bharat,” which means India in Hindi. Although Indians have been calling their country Bharat for a long time, using the name officially in a global community is unprecedented. Because of this, there is speculation over whether India is changing its name. Numerous news sources predict that this is a political strategy for Modi’s upcoming elections next year. But who is Modi and how does changing the name of his country benefit him?
In the 2014 elections, the dominant party lost public support due to a corruption scandal and economic downfall. Because of this, there was a power shift from the Indian National Congress (INC) to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), represented by Narendra Modi. Born in a lower-class Hindu family, he emphasized Hindu supremacy and gained supporters. He did this by creating policies favoring Hindus, who make up roughly 80 percent of the population, and ostracized other religions such as Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism. The oppression of Islam was the strongest. Modi worked to “prevent” love jihad, which describes a situation in which an Islamic man forces conversion on his Hindu wife. Suspected men were jailed and violent repression was allowed. The frequency of love jihad is unclear, but Modi’s policies have even led to the lynching of Islam men in some cases.
A second policy of Modi’s was prohibiting the killing of cows. Cows are considered sacred in the Hindu religion, and some areas such as Gujarat had already passed legislation against it. Modi spread such legislation across the country and has even prohibited Muslims from eating beef as their religion prohibits eating pork. They have also engaged in physical conflict with Pakistan, an Islamic country. When Modi was running in the elections to keep his position in 2019, conflict escalated in the Kashmir region, a region divided between Pakistan and India for decades due to religious conflict.
In February 2019, Islamic terrorists (condemned by Pakistan) committed a large-scale suicide bombing near the Indian territory of Kashmir, which led to outrage among its inhabitants. Modi promptly attacked Pakistan, crossing the border, increasing his support from many Hindu nationalists. The BJP reported the suicide terrorists as having killed hundreds of people, and described Modi as a “warden” or a guard, capable of protecting India from outside harm in their electoral campaign. Modi won by a landslide in the 2019 elections, and about 76 percent of India still supports him. This is exceptionally high, but considering how it had once been above 80 percent, Modi’s government needs new ways to bolster his support, and one of those may be changing the country’s name. They have argued that the word “India” is a remnant of the period of colonization and that they would like to be called Bharat, the “traditional” name of the country from the ancient Sanskrit language. Whether this is how India started being called by that name is still debated.
The INC, or the political power opposing Modi, argues that there is a precedent set in 2016, when a lawsuit that requested the country’s name be changed was denied.
Modi’s Hindu supremacy is only getting stronger as time moves closer to the elections, but some criticize that this has degraded India’s democracy. Freedom House, a non-profit organization that measures a country’s freedom annually, has even lowered India’s status from free to partly free in 2023.