I am not surprised that John Gomes was disturbed by some nationalist attempt to rename India Bharat. This name ‘Bharat’ taken from the hero of a Hindu epic may appease the Hindu majority but mean nothing to the minorities (some 200m Muslims, Christians). This lack of sensitivity to non-Hindu sentiment is characteristic of the BJPwalas & their coarse leader Modi. When Hindu nationalists want to demonstrate transformation, they can only do so at a crude level, typically by changing names of towns or streets or erecting tall statues to mediocrities. One such a statue was intended for Sardar Patel but the Hindus did not have the technical skills and had to call in the Chinese to build it.
To expand on this issue, it’s worth noting that historically Hindustan has never excelled in the intellectual domain: high level discourse, critical thinking, innovation or invention. [What a difference Shashi Tharoor as PM would make.] Way back in the 11th century (c.1020), Persian scholar Al-Biruni who accompanied the first major Muslim invader Mahmud of Ghazni, made a study of Hindu society and he was not impressed. He wrote: “The scientific ideas of the Hindus are utterly confused and devoid of any logical order...they do not seem to understand the methods of a strictly scientific deduction.” [See Islamic Civilisation in South Asia by Burjor Avari, Routledge 2013] Some five centuries later, the first Mughal Emperor Babur revealed in his famous Memoirs c.1530 that he too found Hindustan backward in most respects. Intellectual production remains poor to this day and more so under the BJP regime. In the absence of creativity, BJP officials have succumbed to the temptation to plagiarise even foreign material into Indian government documents & journals and pass it as one’s own. The brilliant watchdog site Altnews.in has discovered several BJP transgressions. Examples: 1. The Union Ministry of Road Transport & Highways website has been shamelessly using pictures of US and Canadian roadways! 2. The Home Ministry Annual Report 2016-17 copied the image of the Spain-Morocco floodlit border to pass off as the India-Pak border. [Pity that images cannot be shown on GoaNet.] Eddie Sent from Mail<https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=550986> for Windows 10
