Freudian Typo? BJP Advertisement's Play on Karimnagar Revives Name Change Debate in Telangana

An advertisement on the front page of major newspapers in Telangana on Thursday for a public meeting by the BJP has created confusion among readers.

The ad welcoming party chief JP Nadda to the concluding phase of the ‘Praja Sangrama Yatra’ spells Karimnagar as Karinagar. While initially, the slip-up appears to be a typo, on closer look, the spelling seems to have been used strategically in the advertisement.

The name ‘Karinagar’ in the header and the venue changes to ‘Karimnagar’ while introducing BJP’s Telangana chief Bandi Sanjay Kumar. Clearing the confusion, BJP leader and former Uppal MLA NVSS Prabhakar told News18: “It is not a typo. The name is Karinagar from a historical point of view. It was changed to Karimnagar by the Nizams.”

He added: “Bandi Sanjay had announced earlier that after BJP comes to power, the real history and culture of the state will be protected. If Calcutta can become Kolkata, Madras can become Chennai, then why not this? Karimnagar was Karinagar before. Nizamabad was Indur, Mahabubnagar was Palamooru and Hyderabad was Bhagyanagar. Our party plans to revive the original histories of these places.”

Changing Hyderabad’s name to Bhagyanagar has been a long-standing poll promise of the BJP. The names of Allahabad and Mughal Sarai were also changed under the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh.

While addressing a meeting of party workers this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi referred to Hyderabad as Bhagyanagar. “This was the place where the term ‘Ek Bharat’ was coined by freedom fighter Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel,” the PM had said. The BJP unit in Hyderabad also refers to Hussainsagar, a water body in the city, as Vinayaksagar.

The name change issue has been a bone of contention since the BJP floated the idea, especially during the GHMC elections in 2020. The name ‘Bhagyanagar’ is linked to two sources — the Bhagyalakshmi Temple abutting Charminar in Old City and a story that says a Hindu woman, Bhagmati, was the lover of Quli Qutb Shah, the founder of Hyderabad. However, both the sources have been called concocted by historians time and again.

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