FOREVER INDIA

WE SHOULD CONTINUE TO USE BOTH INDIA AND BHARAT RATHER THAN RELINQUISH OUR CLAIM TO A NAME REDOLENT OF HISTORY, A NAME THAT IS RECOGNISED AROUND THE WORLD

- SHASHI THAROOR

Reconciling irreconcilables is a great Indian virtue. When the Constituent Assembly was divided over whether to call our country 'India' or 'Bharat', our founding fathers and mothers found the perfect compromise in drafting the Republic's foundational document, referring to "India, that is Bharat" and making both sides happy. The Preamble speaks of "We, the People of India" in English, and "Bharat ke log" in Hindi. Article 52 declares, in English, that "There shall be a President of India", and in Hindi calls the position "Bharat ke Rashtrapati". A simple, uncomplicated practice followed from all this: in English, and therefore internationally, our country was referred to as 'India'; in Hindi and other Indian languages, 'Bharat' was our country's name.

It worked, just as the country known in English as 'Germany' is Deutschland at home and to all who speak Deutsch (the language we refer to as 'German'). Nobody in that proud country, whose nationalism was at one time far more ferocious than ours, insisted that English speakers had to call them Deutschland too.

But what has worked for 76 years, and for a few millennia before that, is apparently not good enough for our government. The sudden unsettling decision to have the President of India issue formal invitations as "the President of Bharat" and for the prime minister to sit behind a name-plate at the G20 summit saying 'Bharat' in the Roman script, rather than 'India', has sparked off a controversy that is both pointless and totally unnecessary. Why tamper with an arrangement that was working perfectly satisfactorily? As the Americans like to say, "if it ain't broke, why fix it?"