What’s in a Name? Why States Care About What They Are Called

Source: Wikimedia Commons

I was in my final year of high school in New Delhi when India hosted the 2023 G20 Summit. In the weeks leading up to the event, the city felt like a stage set. In anticipation of the arrival of foreign dignitaries, the messily graffitied walls lining the streets were adorned with vibrant Indian art in a variety of styles, pavements were scrubbed until they gleamed, and new fountains appeared overnight along my usual route to school. For those who could not witness this transformation firsthand, live coverage of the welcome preparations seemed to dominate every news channel. All this ignited a burst of patriotic zeal among my classmates, with even those who were usually indifferent to politics suddenly expressing their opinion on every development. One such development was the G20 dinner invitations, issued by the ‘President of Bharat’. 

At first, this seemed insignificant to me. Growing up in northern India and speaking Hindi, I had heard the word Bharat all my life. I heard it in patriotic songs, Independence Day speeches, and films (usually about India’s many conflicts, both real and invented, with Pakistan). Even the Constitution of India refers to the country as Bharat in its very first article. But seeing the word on an official document addressed to international invitees felt different. The Indian state suddenly seemed to be communicating in a new register, elevating a name that had mostly lived within domestic, cultural and political symbolism until then. For a while, this shift dominated headlines. Supporters welcomed it as a long-overdue break from colonial influences. Others, notably opposition leader Rahul Gandhi, criticised it as a political stunt employed by the government to distract from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s alleged ties to the Adani Group, a corporation that an American research firm had accused of financial violations earlier in 2023. 

By the time the G20 Summit concluded, the debate had largely slipped out of public view. I was struck to find that most substantial discussions seemed to occur only in the weeks surrounding the event. Yet in retrospect, the controversy reveals something much larger. India was not alone in navigating the tensions around naming. Similar dynamics have been unfolding in countries like Türkiye and Ukraine. While none of these cases are exactly identical, they illustrate how naming becomes a battleground where states assert national identity, reclaim autonomy, and shape domestic expectations. 

India as Bharat: decolonisation with majoritarian values 

In March 2025, Dattatraya Hosabale, General Secretary of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu-nationalist organisation closely aligned with India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), called for more widespread usage of Bharat. To him, preferring ‘India’ reflects misplaced pride in English superiority and a corresponding shame in one’s cultural origins. 

This position carries another layer not often acknowledged candidly. For many minorities, and secular Indians more broadly, ‘India’ embodies a pluralistic promise, while Bharat is deeply embedded in Hindu mythology and early Sanskrit texts. Choosing Bharat over India implicitly aligns with a vision of the nation as a fundamentally Hindu civilisation. As academic Nitasha Kaul argues, it creates a binary designation wherein those preferring ‘India’ risk being cast as the ‘other’, while Bharat becomes the benchmark of an ‘authentic’ national subject. This framing starts to feel exclusionary, even if the term Bharat itself predates contemporary politics. 

Timing plays a role as well. The push came about amid tightening restrictions on civil liberties and an increasingly blurry line between policy and religious ideology under the BJP government. This, in turn, brings into focus how the reception of such a linguistic reframing depends on who is driving it. Katerina Dalacoura, Associate Professor of International Relations at the LSE, notes that public reactions often hinge on whether people trust the authority that encourages renaming. A renaming supported by a trusted government can feel validating. By contrast, one advanced by a divisive government can feel forced. This tension becomes clearer in Türkiye.

Türkiye: symbolic reform in a crisis of political legitimacy 

When the Turkish government formally asked the UN to refer to the country as Türkiye in 2022, commentators focused on the English-language connection to the bird. The optics did indeed matter: the anglicised spelling, Turkey, supposedly carried connotations that negatively reflected on the country’s image. However, like in India, the timing of this change warrants further reflection.

Türkiye began experiencing serious economic challenges in 2021, with inflation rising to around 85% by the end of 2022 and the lira losing almost half its value against the dollar. Polls demonstrate that this eroded public confidence in the government. Against such a backdrop, the renaming might have been a convenient strategy that allowed the government to project strength, reclaim national identity, and most importantly, symbolically appeal to nationalist voters in a time when material conditions were undermining confidence.

Dr Dalacoura is sceptical about the impact of the renaming, doubting it will ‘catch on’ in everyday language. In part, this reflects the fact that the change was state-driven, i.e., a top-down branding effort rather than a shift emerging from everyday usage among the Turkish-speaking population. As she notes, Türkiye has one of the most robust traditions of opinion polling in the world. Yet, there are no surveys on whether the public prefers Türkiye to Turkey. That silence is telling. It suggests the change has yet to resonate widely, or even enter everyday conversation, in the way bottom-up linguistic shifts typically do.

Ukraine: when naming is sovereignty, not symbolism 

Ukraine’s case, however, is quite different, making it an essential case study. If India and Türkiye illustrate how renaming can be employed as a way to consolidate authority within secure territorial frameworks, Ukraine shows what it looks like when the state’s survival is at stake.

Insistence on ‘Ukraine’ without the definite article is a rejection of the Tsarist and Soviet-era usage ‘the Ukraine’, a formulation meant to position the country as a region within Russia. This resistance has been ongoing since Ukraine’s independence, but gained traction in 2014 after Russia annexed Crimea.

As Ukraine now finds itself embroiled in a full-scale war against Russia, naming matters more than ever. It ties directly into physical survival and statehood, as symbolic aggression can feel very real when your country is fighting to stay on the map. Correcting the name is therefore existential for Ukraine. It shapes how other states conceptualise its status on the world stage, which in turn impacts how non-state actors, like the media, narrate the conflict. What appears to be a grammatical correction becomes an assertion of geopolitical survival. This is why many ordinary Ukrainians seem to have embraced it passionately. 

What these comparisons illuminate

Taken together, these three cases highlight that naming is much more than a cosmetic choice. It is an arena where states negotiate identity and authority, externally (against Western or imperial standards) and internally (amid political pressures and public opinion). 

The goal here is not to determine which renaming effort is more ‘legitimate’ or ‘justified’. Hierarchical thinking misses what is most enlightening about these conversations. Each case forces a confrontation with deeper questions. Who gets to define a nation’s character? Who has the authority to rewrite it? Which identities are highlighted, and which are ignored? And whose sense of belonging becomes the national default? In India’s case, I remain unconvinced that Bharat would serve the nation’s pluralistic fabric. The debate itself, however short-lived, was valuable. If anything, India’s challenge is to continue to explore ways of expressing its decolonial aspirations without narrowing its sense of self. This could ultimately mean reaffirming the name the world already knows, if it does indeed represent a more inclusive picture.

Written by Abhilasha Achary

Edited by Aditya Gupta