Prime Minister Prachanda has validated the proverb "old habits die hard" by making an unwarranted statement that he will rename the provinces based on identity if voted to majority in the next election.

All the states have adopted geography based or riverine names, such as Sudurpaschim, Karnali, Lumbini, Gandaki, Bagmati, Madhesh and now Koshi.

He was speaking at a programme held to observe the Day of indigenous people in the capital city on Wednesday.

Prachanda has been alleged as a political leader who says one thing in the morning and yet another diagonally differently in the afternoon. Come evening, and he changes his tone often in the opposite direction.

A petition in the Supreme Court is staring him on his eyes after it was filed following his statement at the open air theater that he was responsible for the killing of 5,000 people out of the 17,000 that perished in the People's War.

Very recently, he told at a book release function that Pritam Singh, an Indian national and his friend, had made several attempts to make him the prime minister by running to the power centres in Delhi. It sparked much hue and cry in the parliament, and the Prime Minister had to offer an apology in order to quell it down. This latest remark has raised people's eyebrows as it was made at a time when some people of Koshi Pradesh are protesting over its name, Koshi.

A glance through the history of the Indian sub-continent reveals that generally geographic-based and a few distinctiveness-based names have been adopted in the past. The 16 Mahajanapads that existed from the seventh to fourth century BC wereAnga, Assaka, Avanti, Chedi, Gandhara, Kashi, Kamboja, Kosala, Kuru, Magadha, Malla, Matsya (or Machcha), Panchala, Surasena, Vṛji and Vatsa. It can be seen that only Anga, Kamboja, Malla and Matsya were individuality based.

Others were largely physically based.

The zones that were named in the Panchayat time were allterrestrial.

These were Mahakali, Seti, Karnali, Bheri, Rapti, Dhaulagiri, Lumbini, Gandaki, Bagmati, Narayani, Janakpur, Koshi, Sagarmatha and Mechi.

One can see that either they followed the names of the rivers or the mountains with Janakpur and Lumbini as the exception.

The Maoists, during their People's War, proposed identity based nomenclature for state restructuring.

These were Khasan, Tharuwan, Magarat, Newa, Tamsaling, Kirat, Limbuwan, Kochila, Madhesh and the like. It can now be seen that all the provinces have been named earthily. The last to receive such a name was State No 1, which has been denominated as Koshi.

India also used a mixedup approach. Whilst most of them are geological, such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, there were also linguistic states, such as Punjab, Gujrat, Maharastra and Bengal to name a few. Such states create conflict even to the state of divisiveness. The renaming of Punjab as Khalistan by the fundamentalists in India and fighting for independence had gained momentum in the eighties.

This movement had died down, but it again appears to have resurrected. Its supporters are all around the globe and, most prominently, in Canada.

Former Indian president S Radhakrishnan wrote that the naming of the states should be geographical.

He said that such names, though appearing to belong to nobody, end up belonging to everybody, increasing the state of ownership.

The geographical names have this incredible attraction to belong to everybody.

Radhakrishnan should be taken very seriously by the Nepali people and the leaders. During his state visit in 1963, he had said that he was surprised by many of them he met when they said that Nepal was a small country. He has written that Nepal is, in fact, diverse and thus fairly large in essence if otherwise in area.

At the present, it figures as the 41st populous and 93rd largest country in the world. He had further said that it should be governed with social justice, failing which there may be a revolution, and people may take part shedding their blood and giving up their life.

The prophecy of the former president came to be true when the Maoists declared a People's War in the early nineties. It led to the killing of 17,000 people followed by the arson of several government offices. This is physical damage. The social and cultural damages are simply staggering and cannot be expressed in numbers. Had the political leaders lent their ear to what the former president said, Nepal would not be in a sorry plight as it is at the present.

The presence of a few characteristic-based provinces cannot be wished out of existence as history clearly shows. However, it did not happen in the case of Nepal in view of all the provinces bearing earthly names. But the effort to have all of them identity based can be dangerous indeed.

To rename the provinces is not a cake walk like those of the cities. We can see how in India Bombay and Poona used by the Britishers have been renamed as Mumbai and Pune.

In Nepal, this phenomenon has not gathered the storm as Nepal was not a colony of outside powers.

But still some undercurrents can be felt regarding the desire to change the names of Kathmandu and Bhaktapur to Yala and Khwopa, which are Kirat names. Bhaktapur already has an engineering college named after Khwopa.

Prime Minister Prachanda has been receiving bouquets lately for his launching of the war against corruption as exemplified by the fake Bhutanese refugee, Lalita land grab scams and now the one quintal gold smuggling case. But his unbecoming and impossible remarks at times mire him in controversial morass, for which he should be careful.

This, however, has not been the case in view of one fumble after another in his speech lately.

A version of this article appears in the print on August 15, 2023, of The Himalayan Times.