Ten of these places are located in Haridwar district, four in Dehradun, two in Nainital and one in Udham Singh Nagar. Aurangzebpur in Haridwar has been renamed Shivaji Nagar, Ghaziwali as Arya Nagar, Khanpur as Shri Krishnapur and Khanpur Kursali as Ambedkar Nagar.

Likewise, Miyanwala in Dehradun will now be called Ramjiwala, Chandpur Khurd as Prithviraj Nagar, Nawabi Road in Nainital has a new name Atal Road and Panchukki Marg has been renamed Guru Golwalkar Marg after the second Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief.

“The changes have been made in accordance with the will of the people and per Indian culture and heritage of the country by honouring the great personalities,” claimed Dhami.

The Uttarakhand Chief Minister, who has launched a relentless anti-Muslim rhetoric even since he took over the reins in 2021, began with ‘Land Jehad’, ‘Love Jehad’, ‘Mazar Jehad’, ‘Thook Jehad’, implementation of the Uniform Civil Code ((UCC) and action against Madrassas.

Dhami is a young Hindutva icon of BJP-RSS who is credited with implementing the ‘Hindutva Gujarat Model’ in the hill state of Uttarakhand, reaping rich political dividends for this Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The BJP officially lauded the state government for changing the names as part of the campaign to eradicate the “last vestiges of slavery.”

“Uttarakhand has announced the renaming of several locations across Haridwar, Dehradun, Nainital and Udham Singh Nagar districts. The new names reflect public sentiment and uphold India’s cultural and historical heritage. This initiative seeks to honour great personalities who have played a significant role in preserving Indian culture, inspiring future generations,” BJP leader and its IT cell chief Amit Malviya posted on X.

Rajput Community Miffed?

Interestingly, in its zeal to erase any Muslim-sounding or lslamic names, Dhami has also changed the name of ‘Miyanwala’ village near Dehradun which has nothing to do with Muslims. It was a Rajput village. The renaming of their village is brewing resentment among the Rajput community, which has demanded that the state government should refrain from renaming their village. The ‘Miyans’ are a famous Rajput clan in Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh hills, known for their military valour.

Jai Singh Rawat, a senior journalist in Uttarakhand, said the state government should look into history and not act blinded by their opposition of anything that sounds Muslim. “The ‘Miyans’ are famous Rajput clan and Miyanwala is their village. The BJP-RSS think-tanks should educate themselves before acting impulsively in their anti-Muslim campaign,” he told this reporter.

The writer is a freelancer based in Dehradun, Uttarakhand.

Courtesy: Newsclick

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An Uttar Pradesh department has set in motion an exercise to examine if this city was known by any other name in ancient times, triggering speculation that the Yogi Adityanath government is planning to rename Agra. Ironically it is the ‘Bahujan’ University faculty that is being ‘used’’ for the purpose. Agra’s Bhim Rao Ambedkar University has now constituted a committee to go into the issue, following a letter from the local administration, Vice-Chancellor Arvind Dixit told PTI on Monday.

According to him, some Agra residents posted a demand to rename Agra on the state government’s Stamp and Registration Department website. This was then referred to Agra administration, which in turn approached the university.

India Today reported that in state capital Lucknow, there was no official confirmation on any move to rename the City of Taj. However, in the recent past, Allahabad has been renamed Prayagraj and Faizabad district is now called Ayodhya. Ambedkar university’s History department head Sugam Anand said a panel will examine the issue.

“A committee has been formed comprising local research scholars, research students and myself. The committee’s work will be to delve into the archival and documented records in history to see if Agra ever had an ancient name,” he told PTI.

He said informal discussions are being held with experts to start gathering information. He also invited participation from the public if they had any evidence on any ancient name for Agra.

Anand said there have been a lot of stories about ancient Agra going by some other name, but “no documented evidence is available yet”. On Agra’s ancient history, he said a hoard of coins with the name ‘Guhilshri’ or `Shriguhil’ inscribed on them was found in 1863.

Agra Fort is said to stand on a site traditionally known as Badalgarh. 

History according to Wikipedia

Agra (listen)) is a city on the banks of the Yamuna river in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh(UP) UP has come under  the hardline BJP since March 2017. Agra is 206 kilometres (128 mi) south of the national capital New Delhi. Agra is the fourth-most populous city in Uttar Pradesh and 24th in India. Agra is a major tourist destination because of its many Mughal-era buildings, most notably the Taj Mahal, Agra Fort and Fatehpur Sikri, all of which are UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Agra is included on the Golden Triangle tourist circuit, along with Delhi and Jaipur; and the Uttar Pradesh Heritage Arc, a tourist circuit of Uttar Pradesh, along with Lucknow and Varanasi. Agra is in the Braj cultural region.

The history of Agra before the Delhi Sultanate is unclear. A 17th century chronicle called it an old settlement which was merely a village, owing to its destruction by Mahmud of Ghazni, before Sikandar made it his capital. The 11th-century Persian poet Mas’ūd Sa’d Salmān writes of an assault on the fortress of Agra, then held by King Jaypal, by Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni. Despite his surrender, Mahmud sacked the place.^[11] It was mentioned for the first time in 1080 AD when a Ghaznavide force captured it. Sultan Sikandar Lodī (1488–1517) was the first to move his capital from Delhi to Agra in 1504, its administration having previously been under Bayana. He governed the country from here and Agra assumed the importance of the second capital. He died in 1517 and his son, Ibrāhīm Lodī, remained in power there for nine more years. Several palaces, wells, and a mosque were built by him in the fort during his period. He was finally defeated at the Battle of Panipat in 1526.^[14] Between 1540 and 1556, Afghans, beginning with Sher Shah Suri, ruled the area. It was the capital of the Mughal Empire from 1556 to 1648. The city was later taken by the Marathas and later still fell to the British Raj.

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“Delhi’s iconic Feroze Shah Kotla stadium to be renamed as Arun Jaitley stadium. Not taking anything away from Arun Jaitley, but I hate this practice of renaming places. It’s like trying to erase a slice of history from our lives,” said a twitter user about the recent decision to rename the Feroze Shah Kotla stadium.
 

The Delhi and District Cricket Association (DDCA) has decided to rename the Feroz Shah Kotla Stadium as Arun Jaitley Stadium after the cricket body’s former president. The stadium was named after the Sultan of Delhi, Firoze Shah Tughlaq since it was built in 1883. Feroze Shah Kotla stadium (being near the Kotla fort), is the second oldest international cricket stadium still functional in India, after the Eden Gardens in Kolkata. Justifying the act, Association president Rajat Sharma said, “It was Arun Jaitley’s support and encouragement that players like Virat Kohli, Virender Sehwag, Gautam Gambhir, Ashish Nehra, Rishabh Pant and many others could make India proud.”

The stadium’s capacity is currently at over 40,000. It has played host to 34 Test matches, 25 ODIs and 5 T20Is. Besides that, it also hosts matches for the Delhi cricket team as well as the Indian Premier League (IPL) franchise Delhi Capitals. The move for this hasty re-naming was widely criticised by netizens who took to social media to raise their concerns over changing historically relevant and popular symbols that make up the heritage, culture and demography of the city.

Feroze Shah Kotla, a wider area, was built in the 14^th Century. The term Kotla translates into citadel. Historian Rana Safvi, who is based in Delhi city, notes that the citadel was part of Firozabad, the fifth city of Delhi, which was built by Firoze Shah Tughlaq. The fortress of Feroz Shah Kotla (literally meaning citadel) stood like a crown to the city, one of the seven that have come to comprise Delhi over time.
 
Explaining that Firozabad was the first city built on the banks of a river, Safvi mentions how the Yamuna flowed beautifully through the city at the time. The citadel was meticulously planned and became a prototype for many forts built later.
 
In the last few years, it has become a trend to portray the rule of Mughals and Islamic emperors as a reign of tyranny devoid of any shades of grey. The tendency is to portray them in these sharp and historically unrealistic binaries is not just crude. It is part of a political agenda. Hence, in this case too, some want to invoke the name of Feroze Shah, in popular imagination to evoke a sense of tyranny and injustice.  Shah’s brother Mohammad Bin Tughlaq is known for several maverick governance decisions –not unlike many taken in the modern-day era.
Twitter users from the bhaktology mould gloated:

Ghiyasuddin,  Mohammad  and  Firoze  Shah  were the three main stalwarts  of the Tughlaq dynasty. Amongst the, history tells us, Firoze Shah was both more energetic and prolific.  His inclination towards building public and religious edifices  can  be evidenced  with  his  credit  of  building  fifty  dams and  embankments,  forty  mosques,  thirty  Madarsahs,  twenty  Khanqahs,  hundred  Kaushaks,  twenty  Rabat, about a hundred  cities,  five  tanks,  ten  hospitals,  one  hundred  fifty  tombs,  three  baths,  one  hundred  fifty  towers,  one hundred fifty Bridges and gardens beyond calculation by the  contemporary  historians  (Alvi). 
 
Researcher Asif Ali notes, “Though  these  figures seem exaggerated  but  his  contribution  as  a  builder  to the mosque architecture  is remarkable in  the history of Islamic architecture in India which can be evidenced by five  mosques  of  his  period  in  Delhi  during  his  reign. Besides  building  many  mosques  Firoz  Shah  also  took interest  in  the  conservation  of  many  buildings.  For instance  the  uppermost  storey  of  Qutub  Minar,  which was  damaged  due  to  lightening,  was  rebuilt  by  him. Unquestionably the development of mosque architecture in India reached at its zenith during Mughal period but its roots were laid in Tughlaq period and especially during Firoze Shah’s reign.”
 
Safvi feels that a better tribute to Jaitley could have been creating something new. She says, “I personally feel that would have been the best homage. But, renaming seems to be an established pattern,”

Post 2014 India: A re-naming spree
In August 2018, the BJP government in its first term and close to the election, changed the name of the historic Mughalsarai Junction Railway Station in UP after the right wing ideologue Deen Dayal Upadhyay, evidently because of the reference to the Indian Muslim Mughal dynasty.

In May 2015, many street signs especially in New Delhi namely Aurangzeb Road, named after the sixth Mughal emperor, were painted black by Shiv Sena Hindustan, a Hindutva outfit. Later, in the same year the government changed the name to APJ Abdul Kalam, the ex-president of India.

In April 2016, city of Gurgaon was renamed to Gurugram after Guru Dronacharya, a mythological figure who favoured upper caste men.

In September 2018, the BJP government also proposed to rename airports in the towns of Bareilly, Kanpur and Agra. The suggested new names were Nath Nagri, after the Hindu Nath sect (to which UP CM Yogi Adityanath belongs) and Deen Dayal Upadhayay.

However, Rizwan Ahmed, a scholar at Qatar University, points out, “renaming cities is not an act that is credited only to the BJP”. Much before BJP, many cities in India were renamed. In 1995, names of the cities of Bombay, Bangalore, and Calcutta were “restored” to their indigenous versions – Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Kolkata respectively – to emphasize its independence from Britain and reject the linguistic symbols left over from the colonial era. The names of the cities Cawnpore and Jubblepore were also changed to Kanpur and Jabalpur to reflect native spelling and pronunciation. Though renaming has been practised in many cities across the world, almost always it is a politically loaded act. Ahmed says, “Place names are an important element of a country’s cultural landscape, as they naturally document and reflect a locality’s heritage and identity. Changing them is often seen as a re-writing of history. Renaming, therefore, is always a hotly debated issue”.

He notes that renaming seems a lot more acceptable when it is done to restore the names to their original or native names in defiance to the colonial rule. However, he says, “when it is done solely to privilege one of the many available readings of a place’s history and identity, it becomes a divisive force, helping to accentuate political, social and historic divisions within a community.”

In today’s India, there is an increasing attempt to show Muslims as invaders and paint the picture of British colonial rule and ‘Muslim rule’ as alike and ‘exploitative’. This is reflected in PM Modi’s statement that India is troubled by “1200 years of slave mentality”.  Not only does this show a poor understanding of history: collapsing 200 years of British rule with those of the Mughals shows a scant understanding of both history and colonialism. While the British used India solely as a colony, the Mughals, even while being part of a feudal era and remaining rulers, generated wealth that remained within. The multifarious and layers of cultures borne in the Mughal period, too is legion.   Scholars have pointed out that even kings like Aurangzeb, who were, “not much different from other kings”, destroyed some temples but simultaneously protected many others, demonstrating that his actions were not driven by “cruelty” or a desire for religious oppression, but political considerations.

In a similar vein, to rename the Feroze Shah Kotla stadium, raises questions on the intentions of the government. Firoze Shah, as is evident, was a connoisseur and lover of architecture, art, sculpture and more. This identity is part of our multi-layered past. He was a man with an extraordinary vision of public buildings and construction. At a time when we have a poor public aesthetic –especially in the concrete, PWD structures springing up in urban centres, this deep sense of the aesthetic and conservationism needs special appreciation.

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Image Courtesy: ANI

As reported in the ANI, a group of unidentified miscreants threw paint on the board at the Aurangabad railway station, thereby erasing its name and then stuck a poster on the board which read ‘Sambhaji nagar.’

In a video that has gone viral on social media, a group of three men can be seen indulging in this act with the man in saffron scarf executing the entire scenario while the others are seen laughing and smirking. The man with the saffron scarf then posed with the renamed board.

Police Inspector Rameswaram Rodge said, “We will give strict punishment to the miscreants. They will be arrested soon.”

This comes after various governments have renamed cities as well as railway stations across the nation. It is pertinent to note the trend in this official name changing decisions, where a Muslim name gets replaced by a Hindu name. 

Just last year, the Elphinstone railway station on the Mumbai Western railway was renamed as Prabhadevi in honour of a local deity Prabhadevi and to erase a “colonial” name. Interestingly, the demand for change of name of the station had been raised by leaders of the ruling BJP and Shiv Sena. In 2018, the Yogi Adityanath led-BJP government renamed the Mughalsarai Railway station to Deen Dayal Upadhyay, Allahabad city to Prayagraj among others.

Though in the latest incident, the change of name of Aurangabad is done by unofficial sources, but one cannot ignore the saffron scarf worn by the miscreants. This clearly indicates that they belong to or believe in a particular ideology, Hindutva to be precise. Whether it was an independent act or supported by some powerful sources is something that the further investigations will reveal.

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