A day after Bharatiya Janata Party MLA from Sardhana in Meerut, Sangeet Som, raised the demand for renaming Muzaffarnagar district as Lakshmi Nagar, ruling party’s legislator from Agra North, Jagan Prasad Garg, has asked the government to rename the City of Taj as Agra-van or Agra-wal.  

The ancient name of Muzaffarnagar is Shukrataal.

After Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath announced the renaming of Allahabad as Prayagraj and Faizabad district as Ayodhya, the BJP leaders have also jumped on the name-change bandwagon.

Garg said in Agra on Saturday that as people from Agrawal community used to live there, the name of the city should be Agra-van or Agra-wal.

“Agra has no meaning. You check the name Agra anywhere... what relevance does it have?” he asked

Garg, who represents the Agra North constituency in Uttar Pradesh assembly further said that he would meet the Chief Minister and demand that the name of Agra be changed.

Sangeet Som has a demand of his own. The controversial MLA from Sardhana has demanded that the name of Muzaffarnagar be changed to Laxmi Nagar, saying this demand had come from the people.

“What I am saying is that we are trying to undo what the Mughals have done to erase the culture of India, especially Hindutva. India’s identity is its culture. We are working to safeguard it and the BJP will move forward on it,” he said.

These demands have come against the backdrop of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath renaming Allahabad as Prayagraj and Faizabad as Ayodhya and the ruling party justifying the change in the names by saying they are merely restoring the old names and “correcting historical distortions”.

A BJP leader said that the two most-recent name changes – Prayagraj  and Ayodhya – were “politically very crucial for the BJP” and thus needed to be done/

“But if demands continue to pour in, we will have to see what we can do and what we cannot,” he added.

This name-changing spree has received mixed response with critics calling it an attempt to distract attention from the fact that there has been no real change on the ground.

“What kind of an agenda is this? How can you obliterate Faizabad and Allahabad? This is the politics of hate and polarisation,” said Samajwadi Party spokesman and MLC Sunil Singh. 

The BJP government had earlier changed the name of Mughalsarai railway junction to Deen Dayal Upadhyay Nagar junction.

Taking a cue from Yogi Adityanath, the Gujarat government also wants to rename Ahmedabad as Karnavati. Its opponents have labelled the move as another poll gimmick of the ruling party.