BJP-led local govt set to change Aligarh’s name to Harigarh

NEW DELHI: The Aligarh Municipal Corporation has passed a resolution to rename Aligarh as Harigarh, mayor Prashant Singhal announced on Tuesday.

“During a meeting on Sunday, our councillor Sanjay Pandit proposed the name change from Aligarh to Harigarh,” Singhal said, adding that the resolution will now be sent to the government for consideration.

“The proposal garnered unanimous support from all councillors, and it will now be submitted to the government for their consideration. We are hopeful that the government will respond positively to our request. The renaming of Aligarh to Harigarh has been a long-standing demand,” the mayor was quoted by a leading newspaper as saying.

A proposal to rename Aligarh was cleared by a zila panchayat meeting in 2021 as well but no developments took place after it was sent to chief minister Yogi Adityanath.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led Aligarh civic body is now reviving the issue. The district councils of Aligarh and Mainpuri had passed similar resolutions in 2022 as well, the newspaper report said. The Mainpuri district council had sought to rename Mainpuri to Mayan Nagar. According to the Mainpuri district council president, the district was originally founded by the sage Mayan hence it should be renamed as Mayan Nagar.

The renaming of these two districts is set to join a long list of name changes in Uttar Pradesh.

In 2018, Allahabad was renamed as Prayagraj at a cost of over Rs300 crore and the 156-year-old Mughalsarai junction was renamed as Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyaya junction. In 2021, Faizabad was renamed as Ayodhya district.

In 2019, Adityanath had indicated that his government will continue renaming places across the state, another media report said.

The renaming of these places has subsequently led to a surge in demand for the renaming of various cities. In Agra, a lawmaker has proposed changing the city’s name to Agravan or Agarwal, while another has suggested renaming Muzaffarnagar to Laxmi Nagar, the report said.