Context: Recently, the Supreme Court has ordered that a plea to change India’s name exclusively to ‘Bharat’ be converted into a representation and forwarded to the Union government for an appropriate decision.

• The Court said, “Bharat and India are both names given in the Constitution. India is already called ‘Bharat’ in the Constitution”.

Background of the issue

• A petition was filed which said, ‘India’ is a name of foreign origin. The name can be traced back to the Greek term ‘Indica’.
• The petition seeks an amendment to Article 1 of the Constitution, which says “India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States”.
• It wants ‘India’ to be struck off from the Article. This is to ensure citizens of this country to get over the colonial past and instil a sense of pride in our nationality.
• And it will also justify the hard fought freedom by our freedom fighters.

How constituent assembly dealt with this?

• The constituent assembly debated Article 1 of the then draft constitution prepared under the chairmanship of BR Ambedkar.
• It was a heated debate that saw sharp exchanges among the members on November 18, 1949 – just eight days before the Constitution was adopted by “We, the people”.
• HV Kamath objected to the Ambedkar committee’s draft that had two names – India and Bharat.
• He proposed amendments to Article 1 putting Bharat or alternatively Hind as the primary name for the country and pronouncing India only as the name in the English language.
• Seth Govind Das said, “India, that is, Bharat” are not beautiful words for the name of a country. We should have put the words “Bharat known as India also in foreign countries.”
• Das cited the Vedas, the Mahabharat, couple of Puranas and the writings of Chinese traveller Hiuen-Tsang to say that Bharat was the original name of the country, hence India should not be put as the primary name in the constitution post-independence.
• He also invoked Mahatma Gandhi saying that the country fought the battle of freedom raising the slogan of “Bharat Mata Ki Jai” asserting that Bharat could be the only plausible name for the country.
• Among others who supported India being named only as Bharat included KV Rao from Andhra Pradesh.
• MA Ayyangar of Madras province proposed names of Bharat, Bharat Varsha and Hindustan as substitutes for India in Article 1.
• At the end, when Rajendra Prasad put the amendments to vote, all fell. Article 1 remained intact as “India, that is Bharat”. However, the debate has continued.

What the constitution says?

• As per Article 1 in the Constitution, the territory of India shall consist of: The territories of the states, The Union territories and Any territory that may be acquired.
• The names of the States and the Unions have been described in the First Schedule. This schedule also held that there were four Categories of State and territories – Part A, Part B, Part C and Part D.
• In the seventh amendment of the Constitution in 1956 the distinction between the Part A and Part B states was abolished. Subsequently states were reorganized on linguistic basis.