The Unnao administration has sent a proposal to the Uttar Pradesh government recommending to change the name of Miyaganj block – a gram sabha in the district – to “Mayaganj”.
“A proposal was presented by Miyaganj gram panchayat to change the name to Mayaganj. The proposal came through the Chief Development Officer and the local SDM. We have forwarded the proposal to the government for further action,” Unnao District Magistrate Ravindra Kumar said on Wednesday.
In a letter to the Panchayati Raj Department of the state, the DM said that proceedings to change the name of the gram sabha were started after a letter from BJP MLA from Safipur, Bamba Lal Diwakar, in this regard.
Diwakar told The Indian Express that the idea to change the name came from a speech made by Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath in the run-up to the 2017 assembly polls.
“During an election rally in 2017, Adityanath-ji had said that if there was a BJP government in the state, the name would be Mayaganj and not Miyaganj. Following up on that, I had spoken to the CM about the name change and he had asked me to send a proposal. We will wait for it to get finalised,” he was quoted as saying.
Adding to the name-changing spree in the state, Minister of State Rama Shankar Singh Patel made a similar demand for Mirzapur district, recommending to change its name to ‘Vindhya Dham’.
The latest entrants on the list of renamed districts will be Aligarh and Mainpuri. The former is to be renamed Harigarh, while the latter will be called Mayan Nagar.
Aligarh, which houses the famous Aligarh Muslim University, was called Ramgarh earlier. In the mid 1700s, it was renamed Aligarh after the name of the city’s most important fort. The first attempt to rename Aligarh was made by Kalyan Singh in 1992 but could not succeed during the Congress rule the Centre.