MUMBAI….Christopher Hitchens is feeling peevish:
When Salman Rushdie wrote, in The Moor’s Last Sigh in 1995, that “those who hated India, those who sought to ruin it, would need to ruin Bombay,” he was alluding to the Hindu chauvinists who had tried to exert their own monopoly in the city and who had forcibly renamed it — after a Hindu goddess — Mumbai. We all now collude with this, in the same way that most newspapers and TV stations do the Burmese junta’s work for it by using the fake name Myanmar.
Andrew Sullivan approves: “I wasn’t aware of this but now that I am, the Dish will refer to Mumbai by its previous name.”
Hold on a second. The Burma/Myanmar issue hinges on whether you think its ruling military junta is legitimate. No such ambiguity attaches to Mumbai. The Shiv Sena party may indeed be Hindu chauvinists, but Mumbai’s name change was eventually approved by the democratically elected municipal corporation of the city, the state of Maharashtra, and the federal government of India, and they’ve stuck to it for over a decade now. Like it or not, there’s no question that this was a legitimate change. Comparing it to the renaming of Burma is absurd.
