I am reminded of a conversation years ago with Pakistan’s defence attaché in London, who later became the Director-General (Analysis) in the Inter-Services Intelligence. I got a call from Brigadier Javed Alam asking what I was doing then. I responded that I was working on my doctoral thesis and a chapter titled ‘threat perception in the Indian Subcontinent’. There was surprise in his voice as he asked me if I thought that the Subcontinent was Indian. My answer was that it was as Indian as the Indian Ocean and that I had said the Indian Subcontinent not India’s Subcontinent.

AYESHA SIDDIQA

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government may have its reasons for pushing the change but Pakistan’s establishment has wanted India to take the name Bharat since 1947. Reportedly, Pakistan’s founding father Mohammad Ali Jinnah was upset with India’s former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru for not naming the country Hindustan or Bharat. Jinnah’s explanation was that ‘India’ not only denoted the colonial legacy but also indicated that the larger country in the Subcontinent had inherited the historical legacy instead of the newly created Pakistan. For Jinnah, this represented New Delhi’s one-upmanship.  Jinnah’s fears were then passed on to later governments, which saw how the name ‘India’ worked for its enemy and against Pakistan’s interests…

In the early years after Independence, Pakistan found to its disadvantage that a number of Muslim states, such as Indonesia, Malaysia and Egypt viewed it as part of the British colonial ploy to break up India. 

While Pakistan’s earlier leadership, including Jinnah, struggled to establish a state for Muslims and present its Muslimness, there was a parallel effort to portray India as a state for Hindus of the Subcontinent and not secular. Indeed, it was part of the formula on which the Subcontinent was divided. However, the political division did not materialise into creating a distinct identity that would naturally establish Pakistan’s raison d’etre – a state formed because the Muslims in the Subcontinent couldn’t live in a Hindu state. The fact that millions of Muslims stayed back in India and considered it their own, despite frequent instances of communal violence, posed a constant sociopolitical challenge….

https://theprint.in/opinion/india-calling-itself-bharat-fulfills-pakistans-age-old-wish/1752232/