Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government seems to be using the G20 conference to rebrand the country as “Bharat.” Howard Chua-Eoan for Bloomberg Opinion considers if the name change will stick.
. The first was inherited from the country’s former British overlords; the other derives from Sanskrit and emanates an ancient sanctity.
One deterrent is that any rebranding comes late in India’s rise to global prominence. It takes some work to make things stick. For India, as one wag on X pointed out, the top-level web domain initials it would expect to have for Bharat have long been taken by Bahrain. Referring to New Delhi’s agglomeration with Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa, one X-twitterati said: “The new abbreviation of BRICS, if India renames itself Bharat and the invited countries join it next year, will be BARBIECUES.”
Modi will open an old can of worms if he decides to ditch “India.” Back in 1947, as independence approached, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, founder of Pakistan, was infuriated that the British allowed his rival Jawaharlal Nehru to keep the name India, making it look like the successor state to the British Raj .
Greece objected to the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia retaining its name after its independence, claiming it for one of its own provinces. Athens was ameliorated in 2019 with an agreement to add a direction of the compass to the new republic. Still, the North Macedonians are mighty annoyed at the extra syllable.The Philippines, the country of my birth, has struggled with its name for more than a century.
Confoederatio Helvetica is not a font but the constitutional name for Switzerland, the Latin papering over the country’s four official languages. The Alpine nation isn’t about to be mistaken for someplace else. Even Spaniards know the difference between someone from Suiza and people from Suecia .
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