When world leaders received an invitation last week to a dinner at the G20 summit in New Delhi from the “president of Bharat”, it unleashed a torrent of speculation.
Was the country that had been known in England as India since at least the time of King Alfred about to officially change its name to its official – and indeed far more ancient – Hindi name, Bharat?
The symbolism was clear. The weak, post-colonial, argumentative and adamantly secular country that Britain knew so fondly as India – with its freewheeling English-language newspapers and Anglophile political elites in the mould of Jawaharlal Nehru – no longer existed.
What we have is a new country: censorious, fiercely Hindu; a great power that is courted non-stop by world
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