Mamata Banerjee on Tuesday expressed displeasure over the rumoured possibility of India’s name being changed by the saffron regime to Bharat, raising questions on the timing and the motive of the purported move.

The Bengal chief minister raised the issue in her address at a state government event in the afternoon to mark Teachers’ Day.

“Today they are changing even the name of India, I heard. The card that has been printed in the name of the honourable President, for a G20 lunch or dinner, mentions ‘Bharat’,” she said, referring to a G20 dinner invite from President Droupadi Murmu, describing her position as “President of Bharat”. It triggered a major debate with the national Opposition alleging that the Narendra Modi government at the Centre was planning to use just Bharat as the country’s name.

“Arrey, we say Bharat anyway, what is new in it? In English, we say India, Indian Constitution… in Hindi, they say Bharat ka Samvidhan,” said Mamata, a principal leader of the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA), the national bloc of anti-BJP parties.

The invitation card, widely shared on social media, prompted the INDIA constituents to allege that the move suggested the saffron regime’s fear of the bloc. The BJP asserted that there was nothing wrong in using Bharat as it was part of the Constitution.

The Trinamul Congress chief said: “Even we say Bharat anyway….”

“There is nothing new to be done. The whole world knows (us) by the name of India,” she added.

Over the years, Mamata has been among the fiercest critics of the saffron ecosystem over politically motivated attempts to rename landmarks and places and rewrite history and popular culture in order to establish a Sangh parivar-approved version of the subcontinent’s past.

“What happened so suddenly that even the nation has to be renamed?” Mamata asked on Tuesday.

“What next, the name of Rabindranath Tagore?” she added.

Mamata has frequently attacked attempts to deify figures that the saffron ecosystem considers iconic, such as Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Deendayal Upadhyaya, often done at the cost of more widely accepted icons with inclusive and secular philosophies like Tagore.

“They are changing names anyway, of universities, of major historic landmarks… changing history itself,” said the chief minister.

One of the Sangh parivar’s pet peeves is that most educational institutions in the country used to teach a “Leftist” version of Indian history that, among other things, glorifies the Mughal rule.