Gurugram: Before UP polls, BJP should've renamed something after Eklavya & not Dronacharya

The BJP's mission to Sanskritise India never tires. The latest addition in its list is renaming Gurgaon in Haryana as Gurugram since as per mythology, the place was given to Dronacharya, the trainer of the Kuru princes, as a gurudakshina. At a time when Gurgaon is one of the faces of India's ever-growing IT industry, this renaming not only makes it inconvenient but even a farce.

• All you need to know about Gurugram, a historic land of Dronacharya
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BJP's untiring efforts towards Sanskritisation

It is unfortunate to see the saffron party, which came to power in Haryana for the first time in 2014 and is still struggling to provide a flawless administration (as the recent Jat protests have shown), the focus is more on taking steps towards Sansritisation to paint the country with a saffron brush just to assert a majoritarian sentiment.

BJP is no better than Congress in the politics of renaming

This is not just meaningless, it also speaks about the ruling party's (both at the Centre and Haryana) to make impact in terms of real issues. If the Congress was guilty of making everything a 'property' of the first family by adding names of its late members before every second institution or scheme in the country, the BJP is no less better as it finds more pleasure in imposing Hindutva through whatever means it can, including renaming or rather deconstructing (Aurangzeb Road in Delhi was rechristened as APJ Abdul Kalam Road after the former president's death last year).

But before UP polls, BJP's honouring Dronacharya could send a wrong signal

But the BJP has perhaps committed a major blunder in renaming Gurgaon as Gurugram in less than a year ahead of the Uttar Pradesh elections. At a time when Prime Minister Narendra Modi is losing no opportunity to reach out to Dalit icon Babasaheb Ambedkar just because the BJP is desperately looking to maintain its hold over the Dalit votes in the crucial state in the next elections to lay the platform for the next Lok Sabha elections in 2019, honouring just Dronacharya, the Brahmin, might be self-defeating.

If the BJP is saying good things on Ambedkar, why didn't it rename something after Eklavya?

The saffron party's balancing game would be to rename something (even if a prominent road in Lucknow) as Eklavya, the Nishada prince who had gave his right thumb to Dronacharya as the cunning guru feared that he could become a better archer than his favourite student Arjuna.

A sports award after Dronacharya's name is enough; we don't need politics

But it hasn't done anything so far to even symbolically honour a tribal youngster who was unjustly treated by Dronacharya who was biased towards his upper-caste pupil Arjuna (he had even meted out a humiliating treatment to Karna, another fine archer of the day).

When PM Modi is speaking in such high regards about Ambedkar, why didn't his party honour Eklavya instead of Dronacharya as that would have done wonders for the BJP among the tribals and outcastes in various parts of the country?

Will we then think that all the good talks about Ambedkar are hollow?

Renaming Gurgaon also exposes the saffronists' confused thinking

Apparently, it feels strange that the Centre, which under Modi is making every effort to make India's case stronger on the international stage, did not speak up on the issue of renaming Gurgaon as Gurugram.

This will create much inconvenience to the outsiders who are connected to the city for business and the brand name will take a beating. This exercise also proves that the saffron ideologoues in India suffer from a confusion of choosing between the West and all that is indegenous.

Saffronists want everything home-made but also love to pursue the West's thinking on political exclusiveness

On the face, they want everything home-made but imitate western ideologies that stress on the politics of exclusivity. The Gurgaon renaming is also a reflection of that confused mindset.