PAKISTAN: Drop That Name

Nations at odds often share with taunting children and shrewish wives an inspired instinct for the stinging epithet that penetrates and festers. Arab maps sometimes refer to Israel as “Jewish Occupied Palestine.” Russians in the U.N. call Nationalist China delegates the “representatives of the Kuomintang.” And for some twelve years since the acrimonious partition of the Indian subcontinent, the Pakistani press, with considered malice and conscientious glee, has called India “Bharat” and referred to Indians as “Bharatis.”

Though Indians smoldered, they really could not complain. Bharata was a legendary Hindu hero so revered that his name became the Sanskrit word for all India, and after India became independent in 1947, traditionalists put into the new constitution this opening sentence: “India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States.” Even today, India’s state-owned radio uses Bharat in Hindi-language programs, but, as one Indian put it, “It is one thing to hear a Hindi-speaking news reader say ‘Bharat,’ and another to have it leap up at you in print in an English-language Pakistani newspaper.”

The Pakistani twist to the word implies that India is a nation centered on a faith, just as Pakistan is, and that neither has a right to the word—India—that both used to share. Pakistani editors practiced Bharatism so zealously, automatically changing the word India every time it turned up, that they would, for example, misquote President Eisenhower as referring to Nehru as the “Prime Minister of ‘Bharat.’ ” The results often got ludicrous. When Hussein Shaheed Suhrawardy visited the U.S. as Pakistan Prime Minister two years ago, Pakistani readers learned that he had been presented with a “Bharati” blanket by a Navajo girl. A translation of John Steinbeck’s The Red Pony called the American Indians in the story “Pak-Bharatis,” meaning the kind of people that used to inhabit India together.

Last week in the growing cordiality between Pakistan’s President Ayub Khan and Nehru, Indians became Indians once more, even in Pakistan. The request came straight from Ayub. Bombay’s Free Press Journal responded gratefully: “This change of attitude of the Pakistani press is welcome in India that WAS Bharat.”