What's in a name? Everything, according to a powerful party boss in Mumbai and his hordes of violent followers. Bal Thackeray, a regional politician who 13 years ago led the charge to change the name of India's financial capital from Bombay to Mumbai, has demanded that city fathers drop ‘Bombay' from prominent institutions where the name still lingers – or else. “We are warning people intoxicated by the name of Bombay,” Thackeray wrote in an editorial Wednesday in the newspaper published by his Shiv Sena party. “This warning should be sufficient. Those that don't understand the warning may find they don't have a path to escape tomorrow.” Thackeray has been linked to waves of mob violence in the past, so police are taking his threats seriously. He has high-profile targets in his sights: the Bombay Stock Exchange, the Bombay High Court, the elite Bombay Scottish School and countless restaurants, shops and offices. More than two dozen Shiv Sena supporters were arrested Tuesday while demonstrating outside the stock exchange. Earlier, activists broke the signs of textile manufacturer Bombay Dyeing while another group scrawled “Mumbai Scottish” across the walls of the Bombay Scottish School. Using the Shiv Sena newspaper as a mouthpiece, Thackeray led a nationalist campaign to drop what he calls the colonially tainted name Bombay – a Portuguese derivation of “beautiful bay” – and replace it with Mumbai, after the local Marathi language name for a Hindu deity. The city is the capital of Maharashtra state. Civic leaders dismissed Thackeray's call as an inflammatory stunt. Bombay Stock Exchange officials said they were not considering a name change. “This is purely an attempt to pressurize institutions,” said V.M. Sukhthankar of the local civic group Agni. “They are trying to raise useless, sentimental issues ... that will temporarily excite and inflame people. Why don't they speak about poverty, drought, instead of raking up baseless issues?” – APIndia went through a wave of name-changing in the 1990s for cities large and small, including Chennai, formerly Madras, and Kolkata, formerly Calcutta. In the editorial, headlined “Slaves of Bombay,” Thackeray said those who use the old name “are against Maharashtra and Mumbai.” “I don't know why they don't like the name Mumbai ... the whole world has accepted Mumbai,” wrote Thackeray, a former newspaper cartoonist.
