It was Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, who wanted our country named either Bharat or Hindustan, to deny it any right to claim the storied legacy of the name India, to which he felt his own state had equal claim. At the same time, our first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, insisted on retaining the name ‘India’ for the newly independent country, in the face of resistance from nativists who wanted it renamed ‘Bharat’, in order to ensure that we were seen as the successor state to the India that had enjoyed membership of the United Nations and the League of Nations. By retaining
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