Media debates over the renaming of the cityscape

3.1 Poznań, Poland

Following the transformation of 1989, in the early 1990s, spontaneous changes of street names took place. These were usually changes from below, instigated by the residents of the street, or proposed by the local authorities: the streets concerned returned to the interwar period names or names commemorating local personages (Hałas 2004). In Poznań, 49 streets were renamed at this time. On 1st April 2016, a parliamentary bill was passed banning the propagation of communism and other totalitarian systems through the naming of public spaces.^[2] This bill gave the local administration 12 months to rename streets. As a result, the Poznań city council, in which the opposition party held the majority at the time, renamed only six streets as the majority had already been renamed before. Should the city council show negligence and not rename all the streets recommended by the Institute of the National Remembrance, the Bill gave the Province Governor the power to rename these streets. As a consequence of this provision, the Poznań Governor (appointed by the ruling party) renamed four more streets. The City council appealed the renaming of one of them: ul. 23 Lutego (the 23rd of February Street).^[3] This street has been renamed eight times over the last 100 years.^[4] After 1989, the framing of the event in the news media and in the perception of the general public changed from “the liberation of Poznań by the Soviet Army” to “the end of the battle of Poznań, the end of occupation of Poznań by Nazi Germany”. The Regional Administrative Court accepted the appeal and declared the Governor’s supplementary ordinance invalid. The Governor appealed the decision of the Regional Administrative Court (RAC) to the Supreme Administrative Court, which upheld RAC’s decision. This renaming battle between the City Council, the members of which are elected in the local elections, and the Province Governor, who is appointed by the central government in Warsaw, has been interpreted as a debate over the curtailing of powers of the local government and a test of the independence of the judiciary. We analyse the arguments used in the debate over this political issue in Section 4.1. below.

3.2 New Delhi, India

Following independence from British colonial rule in 1947, understandably, de-anglicization of place and street names became critical to regaining national and regional pride. However, since the Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Jananta Party (BJP) swept to power in 2014, street and place renaming has become a powerful tool for reinforcing Hindu nationalist ideologies. Also, acts of renaming have taken on a qualitatively different turn, marked by a growing number of assaults on the historical legacy of the (Muslim) Mughal rulers (Robinson 2007; Schimmel 2004). The Hindutva ideology espoused by the BJP is enshrined in a strong orientation towards cultural nationalism, characterized by critics as perpetrating a politics of polarization and a divisive populist agenda that poses a challenge to the secular, pluralistic and inclusive fabric of Indian society. Put simply, the Hindutva ideology states that India is the homeland of the Hindus, its three essentials being: a common nation (rashtra), a common race (jati) and a common culture or civilization (sanskriti). By this logic, “Muslims and Christians could not belong to the Hindu jati, because their sanskriti and their prophets originated outside of the Hindu civilisation” (The Wire, 4 July 2019). Accordingly, a key strategy has been the symbolic erasure of names of (Muslim) Mughal emperors, painted as ruthless villains not worthy of commemoration, particularly in the nation’s capital, New Delhi.

Of focal interest here is the controversial renaming of the prestigious Aurangzeb Road by the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) in August 2015, now christened APJ Abdul Kalam Road in honour of the much-loved late former President of India, at the behest of several BJP members of parliament. The Delhi High Court refused to entertain legal petitions seeking to restrain the NDMC from the renaming. Many historians, however, argued that the former name is a part of Indian history; the name change was an attempt to excise this very part and promote an alternative version of history in the collective memory of India’s citizens. Aurangzeb, the last great, but much maligned Mughal emperor to rule India (1658–1707), is depicted by Hindutva ideologues as a tyrannical ruler and a brutal oppressor of Hindus. In the ensuing debate supporters of the name change argued that a true sense of patriotism entailed “correcting a historical wrong”, while opponents countered that hatred for a 17th century Mughal was being deployed as a political tool for discrediting modern Indian Muslims. Thus, overlaid upon the task of reclaiming India’s local heritage and national identity in a post-colonial setting, is the operation of religious and cultural hegemonic forces triggering communal divisiveness between the majority Hindus (80%) and the Muslim minority (14%) by strategically conflating nationalist sentiments with acts of patriotism. Within this setting, minority initiatives to gain visibility are perceived as threats or at least as acts questioning solidarity towards the state, with implications for homogenization and social justice.

4.1 Poland: Conflicting meanings of the past and the independence of the judiciary

The analysis of the argumentative strategies in Polish newspapers and the below-the-line-comments shows a predominance of ideologically loaded arguments and a relatively smaller importance given to practical concerns, such as the cost of changing street name plaques and documents (see Light and Young 2018 for an overview of the practical limits to street renaming). The ideological arguments can be divided into five categories: history; individual/family/collective memory; legitimization by the will of the (local) community; the everyday naming practices by the inhabitants and the conflict of power between the ruling party and opposition.

Arguments based on an interpretation of history were present both in the analysed newspapers and the below-the-line-comments (BLC). Their main function was to explain why a historical figure or event was deemed (un-)worthy of commemoration. To achieve this, newspapers used various nominalizations to categorize the event of February 23rd. The supporters of the Governor’s decision to rename the street would see the date as commemorating the arrival to or invasion of Poznań by the Soviet Army, the beginning of the Soviet occupation and the glorification of the Soviet Army. The opponents of change argued that the framing of the event has been re-appropriated and now stands for the end of the battle of Poznań, end of Nazi occupation. The internet users are more creative than the journalists, and in their comments construct alternative historical scenarios to highlight the futility of the attempts of what they see as changing the past. They use the irrealis mood or write short historical fiction as in (1) and (2):

In (1), the irrealis mood allows the writer to imply that the Governor would like the Nazi occupation to continue. In (2), where only an excerpt of a longer story is presented, the Nazi army occupying the city is reframed as an army of our Western neighbours. In this phrase the use of our and neighbours to denote the German Army of 1939–1945, in a story written from a Polish perspective, ironically overwrites the role of the occupier with that of a (friendly) neighbour. Another strategy referencing history was a suggestion to re-appropriate the date by assigning it to a different event that happened on the same day, such as ratifying the concordat between Poland and the Holy See or filing for patent for the Diesel engine.

An argumentative strategy that appeals to individual/family/collective memory refers to the civilians who were expelled from Poznań at the beginning of the Nazi occupation and the civilian volunteers who fought on the side of the Soviet Army against the Germans. Collective memory is constructed through the use of such nominalizations as Citadel fighters, ^[7] inhabitants of the city of Poznań, inhabitants of the Wielkopolska region. Individual and family memory in the internet comments are signalled by the first person stories of the hardships of life in occupied Poznań or by retelling of stories heard from parents and grandparents; in newspapers they take the form of “human-interest” stories or letters to the editor. Such arguments concerning the contested meaning of the event rest on the assumption that lived experience gives the participants of history a specific insight into “the true nature” of the past that learning about it from books and documents does not.

Another form of legitimization of the position for or against the renaming was an appeal to the will of the local, or more generally, Polish, community. This argument was often used in below-the-line-comments. Linguistically it was expressed through such nominalizations as the Polish, the people, the inhabitants, Posnanians and Poznań, used metonymically for its inhabitants. The rhetorical power of this strategy was often questioned, as in (3):

Example (3) shows that appealing to the alleged opinions of such large, rather unspecified, groups was less successful as an argumentative strategy than quoting family history. Yet, also the latter sometimes led to insults – a common interaction strategy in below-the-line-comments.

Some of the debaters point to “semantic displacement” (cf. Azaryahu 1996, 2009), that is a bleaching of the historical referent and its subsequent association with a particular landmark (e.g. a street where the Main Post Office is) or to everyday naming practices of the community (cf. also Light and Young 2014, 2018; Palmberger 2018) as a means to subvert the ideological hegemony of state. Some of the internet users also vowed to use the old name to undermine the Governor’s decision, while others sarcastically quoted the Prussian names from before the Great War, which are no longer in use.

The argument referring to the conflict of power between the locally elected City Council and the Regional Governor appointed by the central government, although present in the-below-the-line-comments, was much more prominent in the newspapers, in particular in Gazeta Wyborcza. Both the head of the City Council, Mr. Ganowicz, who appealed the street renaming by the Governor, and the Mayor of Poznań, Mr. Jacek Jaśkowiak, are from Civic Platform (PO), the opposition party in the Parliament. The Governor, Mr. Hoffmann, belongs to Law and Justice (PiS), the governing party. Unlike Głos Wielkopolski, Gazeta Wyborcza devoted much space to questioning the legitimacy of the street renaming by the Governor. Both newspapers reported the reaction of the City Mayor to the ruling of the Regional Administrative Court in much the same wording (here cited after Gazeta Wyborcza):

Here, the very strong statement about extrajudicial actions of the executive power is presented in the form of reported speech, which presents the Mayor of Poznań as a stout opponent of the Law and Justice Government. This excerpt shows that the debate over representation in the semiotic cityscape can be interdiscursively linked to the battle over the independence of the judiciary at a time when the right-wing government is introducing reforms of the judiciary, which are interpreted as curtailing the autonomy of the judges.

4.2 India: Controversy over the symbolic erasure of salient manifestations of India’s Mughal history and social justice

The ideological arguments used in the debate on the renaming of New Delhi’s prestigious Aurangzeb Road can be divided into four main categories: history, moral reprehensibility, appeal to Hindu communal pride, and the “Othering” (Ashcroft et al. 2000: 156–158) of minorities.

Similar to the Poznań case study, a favoured argumentative strategy for justifying why a historical figure or event is deemed (un-)worthy of commemoration is reference to history, both in the mainstream newspapers and articles from the online fora, but less so in the below-the-line comments. Presenting the Middle Ages as a time of constant conflict between the Hindus and the ‘invaders’, proponents of the name change paint Mughal rulers as ‘Muslim outsiders’ who ruled ‘Hindu India’, as ‘aliens’ in the same mould as the British. Questioning this interpretation, opponents of the name change accuse Hindutva ideologues of popularizing a prejudicial narrative that harps on India’s so-called “1,200 years of slavery” by inaccurately lumping together the colonial period with the preceding medieval Muslim era as an undivided period of colonial suffering – a narrative cited by no less than India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi in one of his speeches. They argue that unlike the British, the Mughals made India their home and became an integral part of India’s diverse culture, hence they are not outsiders. Noting how the term “invader” functions as a dog whistle to alienate and demonize the entire Muslim community, one commentator intertextually contends that the renaming of Aurangzeb Road itself constitutes an act of “political invasion”, as one has no right to rename that which one has not built oneself (DailyO 14/08/18). The act is further decried as a “deliberate” move to distort history, to erase the record of the past for ideology’s sake in a form of “toponymic cleansing” (Rose-Redwood et al. 2010: 460; Yeoh 1996), very likely sparking a comprehensive purge of the cityscape of the historical legacy of Moghul rule.

Arguments around moral reprehensibility aroused for validating the renaming. They emphatically cite moral grounds. Aurangzeb in particular is depicted as the archetypal villain in the Hindu nationalist imagination, for destroying Hindu cultural institutions, rampaging Hindu temples and slaughtering millions. Supporters of the renaming, predominantly in below-the-line comments, point to this popular perception of Aurangzeb, as “a cruel, dictatorial and despotic ruler” to justify “the need for correcting the mistakes of our past”. By contrast, the renaming of the road after former President Dr APB Abdul Kalam, universally admired for his generosity and kindness, serves to make the point that a “bad” Muslim has been replaced by a “good” Muslim. However, critics question the targeted nature of the renaming, arguing that the widely internalized view of Aurangzeb as a cruel despot is a misrepresentation of a more complex, nuanced reality (Truschke 2016). They maintain that the real agenda behind this ahistorical condemnation of Aurangzeb is to galvanize anti-Muslim sentiments through overt judgments about what sort of Indian Muslim is acceptable (Aeon, 15/4/17).

In appealing to Hindu communal pride – a powerful tool for promoting their particular brand of identity politics – BJP supporters of the renaming heap praise on India’s “glorious” Hindu past, applauding what is predicated as the government’s efforts to safeguard, restore and reclaim India’s cultural heritage, epitomized by the Gupta period (approximately 319–543 CE) and termed the golden period of Indian history – a period believed to have ended with the coming of the Muslims in 1526 (notwithstanding the huge time lag which attests to the level of absurdity of such an allegation). Counter-arguments, expressed through nominalizations, point to the nostalgic glorification/mythologizing of an imagined past, aimed at the “Hinduisation” or “Saffronisation”^[8] of India (Ahmad 2018; Hansen 1999) in promoting a Hindu nationalist ideology through recourse to discourses of cultural purity and exclusive belonging that seek to deny and delegitimize the manifestations of Mughal contribution to India’s cultural life.

The Mughals had a more than 300-year presence on the subcontinent (1526–1857) and exerted a significant influence on Indian art, architecture and literature. Opponents argue that the imprint of this unprecedented flowering of Indo-Muslim cultural fusion in the public space is viewed as a constant embarrassment to Hindu pride, and short of removal, the next best way to gain popular endorsement of the Hindutva ideology of cultural superiority is to rename these landmarks, as in the case of cities in northern India (e.g., the replacement of Mughalsarai Railway Station, and three airports in 2018 by names with apparent Hindu overtones). Suggesting that for Hindu nationalists, Muslims are a threat to India’s alleged identity as a fundamentally Hindu nation, and interdiscursively referencing the erasure of another emblem of Muslim heritage,^[9] a commentator notes:

The nominalizations by which the government is repeatedly referred to, such as PM Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist BJP government, India’s right-wing Hindu nationalists, hardcore Hindutva elements, Hindu-centric politicians/spin, the Saffron brigade, political saffronites, hardline Hindu mobs and self-appointed guardians of Indianness, indicate clear disapproval of the present regime’s obsession with renaming.

The analysis reveals how those favouring the renaming often seek to legitimize their position by resorting to the “Othering” of religious minorities and the disenfranchized through Sanskritizing^[10] the geography. This privileges the continued hegemony of the upper castes who form the BJP’s powerful voter base, thus enabling the government to firmly consolidate its political power. Critics argue that the erasing of Islamic names in a communally divisive ‘us versus them’ messaging is a way of disempowering India’s Muslims and denying them a stake in the country’s history:

Several reports note how, as elections loom, the renaming spree heats up in a move to appease this voter base, prompting one critic to observe:

As (6) suggests, from the perspective of India’s minority groups current renaming practices index unjust control of access to specific discourses in public spheres in the garb of (Hindu) cultural revival: Sites of name change thus represent struggles over unequal representation of naming rights in public space (Alderman and Inwood 2013: 229).