The Yogi Adityanath government plans to rename Sultanpur district after Ram’s son Kush, a senior official told The Telegraph.

“We were asked to send a report on the possibility of renaming Sultanpur as Kush Bhawanpur,” the official from the state revenue board said on the condition of anonymity.

“We have given our consent. The rest of the work is to be done by the cabinet.”

Dev Mani Dwivedi, BJP politician and MLA from Lambhua in Sultanpur, had raised the subject in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly last week.

He had cited the gazetteer for Sultanpur, last published two decades ago, which claimed that Sultanpur was the capital of Kush’s kingdom and was known as Kush Bhawanpur.

“Kush and his descendants ruled from there from Treta Yuga to Dwapar Yuga,” Dwivedi had said.

It’s believed the place was called Sultanpur when Alauddin Khilji invaded it seven centuries ago to punish two Bhar chieftains who had killed two horse traders.

Several places in Uttar Pradesh that bore “Muslim” names have been renamed since Yogi Adityanath came to power in March 2017, among them Allahabad (now Prayagraj), Mughalsarai (Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyay Nagar) and Faizabad (Ayodhya).

The trend has prompted BJP leaders to keep demanding the renaming of many more places.

Gulab Devi, minister of state for secondary education, has sent a proposal to the chief minister to rename Sambhal as Prithviraj Nagar after the 12th-century Chauhan ruler.

Brijesh Singh, a party MLA, wants Deoband renamed as Dev Vrind; party spokesperson Naveen Srivastava has demanded that Ghazipur be rechristened Gadhipur.

Recently, the Miyanganj village panchayat in Unnao district sent a resolution to the state government to rename itself as Mayaganj.

When Adityanath was Gorakhpur MP from 1998 to 2017, he had organised several marches and sit-ins to demand unsuccessfully that the city’s Urdu Bazar locality be renamed as Hindi Bazar, Ali Nagar as Arya Nagar and Miyan Bazar as Maya Bazar. He has not, however, got these places renamed after becoming chief minister.

Samajwadi Party spokesperson Rajendra Chaudhary said the latest renaming efforts were gimmicks by a party that had no achievement to showcase ahead of the Assembly polls, due in March.

“The BJP did nothing for the state’s development. All they can do now is stoke communal sentiments to win votes,” he said.