‘They want to rub out every detail of Islamic history from India,’ says Saleem Ansar, a resident of Gorakhpur in northern India’s Uttar Pradesh (UP) state. He’s shaking his head at the decision a local governing body took in September 2022 to change the ‘Muslim-sounding names’ of a dozen locations in his home town.
A month later, another such body in UP’s Varanasi announced similar name changes for 10 locations in the city. For example, Nawabganj, reminiscent of governors in the Mughal era (‘nawabs’), was now to be called Durgakund, after a Hindu goddess.
Previously, in May 2022, a leader from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had filed a petition to the Supreme Court seeking the creation of a fact-finding committee to ‘study the real history’ of the Taj Mahal, a 17th-century mausoleum built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan. In his petition, Rajneesh Singh, a dentist by profession and head of the BJP’s media relations in Ayodhya, asserted that though it
