In our country, when car-thieves run off with a vehicle, the first thing they do is change the number plates. Similarly, when someone captures a property through underhand means, the first thing that goes up is a big name-plate next to the heavily locked compound gate, usually with a misplaced apostrophe ‘s’ turning an intended plural into a possessive proper noun. On the other hand, sometimes the opposite process is triggered, say, in a shady takeover of a reputable restaurant or eatery — here, the new owners keep the same signboard and menu (for example, Democracy Bar and Restaurant) while replacing the raw materials previously used to make the food with completely different, adulterated stuff.

Of course, one must emphatically reject all such thoughts when considering the mother of all renamings, as the ruling regime signals that it may want to change the name of the country from the tandem of India and Bharat to just Bharat. One must try and avoid questioning the motives of the powers that be. One must put aside the temptation to suspect that the name change is triggered by the coming together of so many Opposition parties under the acronym of INDIA, or to provide yet another costly distraction from the government’s many monumental failures. There is no way that, in the ninth year of the Hindi-obsessed RSS-BJP’s rule, this sudden push for a name change has anything at all to do with the fast-approaching Lok Sabha elections. Not at all, no way. In fact, it is obvious that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ministerial team of praise-singers are parturient with the purest of intentions in proposing to bring about this nomenclatural chamatkar and we should banish all comparisons to vidushaks affecting lightning-quick costume changes as the lights go out for a few seconds. People may say the government is completely wrong-headed and ill-advised, that the RSS-BJP are sawing away from many directions at the branch on which they — and the rest of us 1.3 billion — are balanced. Regardless, let us minimise the file on impugning their motives for the name change. At least, for a moment.

Let’s put aside the fact that Mr Modi's phalanx has more often than not ‘built’ upon the anti-democratic acts committed by previous Central and state governments to the point of not just pushing the envelope but tearing it to shreds. Let’s not forget that along with other misdemeanours, many political parties previously in power have succumbed to the vice of indiscriminate renaming. If someone says this latest and biggest project of renaming reveals things about the mindset of Mr Modi and his cohorts even more clearly than the spate of all the previous name changes, then let them say it. After all, we are a free country with full freedom of speech. At least, officially.

Of course, people are free to point out the different aspects of the Renaming Roulette. Someone may refer to the militancy and threats of violence with which the name change of Mumbai has been defended; you can ignore the fact that only Marathi and Gujarati-speakers ever called it Mumbai, you can mispronounce it as Moombaai, you can mangle it as Mumboy, but you must call it something that at least vaguely sounds like the official relabelling; god forbid if the name Bombay or Bambai leaves your lips in any public speech. Others may point to the sixteen thousand times things have been named after Jawaharlal Nehru or someone from the Nehru-Gandhi family, especially Indira, but also the undeserving Rajiv; I mean by what right has the centre of New Delhi been turned into a mummy-beta ka memorial? Yet others may argue that we need to follow the lead of our eastern and northern neighbours — look at Myanmar and Yangon, not to mention the first great renaming that was made to the north — when Peking-Pekin-Pequim was reversed to Beijing. Conversely, let us not get caught up in the pesky fact that whatever the Chinese call themselves internally, they have retained the historically and internationally recognised ‘China’. Check out the pronunciation video on Zhongguo and then try saying 'Made in Zhongguo' and you’ll understand why.

Haters will hate, objecters will object, but we should ignore them. Taking off from the China example above, perverse Lutyensias may point out that ‘Bharat’ is unpronounceable by any language culture that doesn’t have an aspirated ‘b’, and that hearing the country forever after being referred to as ‘Baratt’ or ‘B’rat’ or ‘Parrot’ or even ‘Prat’ might be painful, but what of it? Tu bhaag, bhaiya! Some business type may speak of the superb global recognition that’s been built up over 70 years by the hard-to-get wrong* ‘In-dia’, that abandoning the name for an uncertain electoral advantage is like originally owning a brand like Fiat and internationally marketing it as Premier Padmini; but we know the business types, they will come around to anything, even brand-harakiri, once their money is squeezed enough.

Sophists will no doubt have yet another pernicious line of argument: the top RSS-BJP leadership in both party and government consists of little-educated small-towners, their appalling ignorance powering their tiny and regressive world views; this is yet another attempt to take a complex and sophisticated entity like India and pulp it into a simplified chemical orange biscuit; the sanghis are unable to wrap their heads around a genuinely unique country — where so many different things run in parallel, for example, the names, India and Bharat, the administrative use of English (which is now an Indian language as much as any other) along with other major Indian languages, the complementary powers of Centre and states, the mutual checks and balances among executive, legislature, judiciary and administrative services, multiple religions and multiple versions within each religion — and are therefore doing everything to destroy what has been developed through a century-long vision and struggle.

The Khan-marketista taste-arbiters will cringe at what they call the tacky and kitschy ‘decorations’ with which New Delhi was inundated during the G20 extravaganza, the tourist brochure projections on the old monuments, the ghastly, vicious-looking lion sculptures, the dances choreographed to versions of Western pop to welcome the visiting dignitaries, the thousands of pictures of Mr Modi; the less charitable among them will snark that the correct animal symbol for this regime is actually a peacock dressed in a lion’s mane. They will argue that this prastaav of renaming India as Bharat from our leonine peacocks is but a continuation of this grotesque aesthetic.

Perhaps we should let all these people say what they want. After all, they are not that many in number, and so what if they have some learning and genuine experience and understanding of the world outside our country, so what if they have some original vision married to some common sense? Perhaps we should willingly suspend our gawping disbelief and just have faith in this faith-based leadership. If the captain, engineer, navigator and crew of the ship are all elected, perhaps we should just blindly trust them when they say, ‘We are now going to run the ship onto those rocks!’ Once the rocks hole the ship and it starts sinking, it will matter not a jot whether the vessel is called SS India or SS Bharat.