Straight Talk | Modi At 76: The Man Making India ‘Bharat’

PM Modi has made it possible, again, for India to call itself Bharat without apologising for the word

Look at the name card first, because it tells you everything about how this project actually works. It’s the September of 2023. G20 dinner invitations from the President of India go out under the name “President of Bharat". Days later, at the summit itself, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s own placard reads “Bharat", not “India". Three years on, at the BRICS summit that just wrapped in Delhi this past weekend, the same placard sat in front of him again: Bharat. This was not a one-off, neither was it a slip. This has now become pattern, repeated at the country’s two biggest diplomatic stages in three years, each time landing as a “surprise" in the headlines.

That is how PM Modi runs this project. Not through a constitutional amendment renaming the country—Article 1 already does the job, “India, that is Bharat," a line the framers themselves wrote into law in 1950. Instead, PM Modi runs it through repetition, through placement, through making a word so ordinary in official contexts that the country stops flinching at it. A nameplate here. A convention centre there—Bharat Mandapam, built for the G20 and now hosting India’s biggest events, sits in the middle of Delhi as a permanent structure bearing the name in stone. The new Parliament building, inaugurated in 2023, has the Sengol installed beside the Speaker’s chair—the sceptre handed to Jawaharlal Nehru in 1947 by Tamil Nadu’s Thiruvaduthurai Adheenam seers, treated for seventy-odd years as an ignorable symbol of Hindu power, but which now sits at the literal centre of the republic’s legislative power.