Constituent Assembly debates show that both ‘India’ and ‘Bharat’ were retained in the Constitution to align contrasting thoughts voiced by the makers in 1948.
The to-and-fro in the Constituent Assembly happened while discussing the draft Article 1(1) of the Constitution, which had simply read “India shall be a Union of States”.
For some Members of the Constituent Assembly, the name ‘India’ retained a sense of continuity and familiarity, especially among foreign nations.
“India has been known as India throughout history and throughout all these past years,” B.R. Ambedkar said.
He was opposing an amendment to Article 1(1) that India should be known as the ‘Union of India’.
He reasoned that the name of the country was ‘India’ as a member of the UNO. All agreements had been signed under the name.
But there were others who believed that giving the country an ancient name would not queer the march forward.
Member Seth Govind Das said that by supporting the name ‘Bharat’, he was not, as how Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and other Members believed, looking backwards.
“I want to look forward and I also want that there should be scientific inventions in this country. By naming our country as Bharat, we are not doing anything which will prevent us from marching forward. We should indeed give such a name to our country as may be befitting our history and our culture,” he said.
He said even the Chinese traveller Hiuen-Tsang had called this country ‘Bharat’ in his book.
Likewise, Member Shibban Lal Saxena had moved an amendment to change the name of the Union to ‘Bharat’. His amendment also wanted “Hindi written in the Devanagari script to be the national language of Bharat”.
The debates ended with the addition of ‘Bharat’ to Article 1(1). The Article currently reads ‘India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States’.
A row over the name of the country had erupted with a G-20 dinner invitation going out in the name of the ‘President of Bharat’.
In fact, some of the Constituent Assembly Members had wanted the term ‘States’ in Article 1 to be replaced with ‘Pradesh’.
But Pandit Nehru had objected, saying, “Pradesh is a word which has no definition. No one knows what it means… It is a very good word, and gradually it may begin to get a significance, and then of course it can be used either in the Constitution or otherwise. At the present moment, the normal use of the word varies in hundreds of different ways and the word ‘State’ is infinitely more precise, more definite, not only for the outside world, but even for us.”
