SP, BSP also indulged in name change game

| | Lucknow
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SP, BSP also indulged in name change game

Wednesday, 17 October 2018 | PNS | Lucknow

The opposition parties are tearing into the Yogi Adityanath government over renaming of Allahabad as Prayagraj, but the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party regimes did the same thing while in power.

The governments of both the parties passionately indulged in name changing game in the belief that it would prove to be a game changer when the state went to the hustings.

Moreover, there is nothing new in the decision to rename Allahabad as Prayagraj. In fact, Yogi Adityanath is implementing the unfinished agenda of former Chief Minister Rajnath Singh, who had made an announcement to this effect ahead of Ardh Kumbh at Allahabad in 2001.

The proposal was duly approved by the state Cabinet and sent to the Union government led by Atal Bihar Vajpayee for approval. However, the Centre ignored the proposal and a year later, in February 2002, the state went to polls and the Bharatiya Janata Party was defeated. The BSP-BJP coalition government headed by Mayawati came to power and the proposal was shelved.

The  name change campaign did not end there. If sources are to be believed, some other districts in UP with “Muslim sounding names” like Aligarh, Azamgarh, Shahjahanpur, Ghaziabad, Ferozabad, Farrukhabad, Moradabad and Muzaffarnagar could be rechristened and the process could be initiated in 2019.

Before the renaming of Allahabad, the Yogi government had changed names of several roads, parks, crossings, buildings after BJP icon and former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, who passed away in August this year. During the spree, than two dozen public spots and facilities were named after Vajpayee in Lucknow itself.

The Yogi government began its name-changing spree in July by deciding to rename the iconic Mughalsarai railway station after BJP ideologue Deen Dayal Upadhyaya.

The politics of name-change began in UP in 2007 when the BSP was in power. Mayawati renamed eight districts — most of them after Dalit icons. Shamli was renamed as Prabuddh Nagar, Sambhal as Bhim Nagar, Hapur as Panchsheel Nagar, Kanpur Dehat as Ramabai Nagar, Kasganj as Kanshi Ram Nagar, Amethi as Chhatrapati Shahuji Maharaj Nagar, Amroha as Jyotiba Phule Nagar and Hathras as Mahamaya Nagar.

The process of renaming districts not only incurred huge financial burden due to repainting of signage and reprinting of official stationery, it also led to widespread confusion. There were instances of people boarding wrong buses and sending postal goods to wrong addresses.

Mayawati had also renamed the historic King George’s Medical University (KGMU) of Lucknow as Chhatrapati Shahuji Maharaj Medical University. This had irked the alumni of the KGMU, popularly known as Georgians, across the world. Later, the SP regime had restored the old name of the medical university.

The name-changing did not help the BSP and the party was voted out of power in 2012 UP assembly election.

The next SP government led by Akhilesh Yadav lost no time in restoring the public institutions to their original names. Though he did not rename the districts, he built new parks and buildings and named them after socialist icons, like Janeshwar Misra Park and JP International Centre.

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