On many occasions I've heard one of my parents mentioning several times that changing the country's name from Pakistan to "confederation of Indus nations."
Some of my friends and associates also claim that Pakistan should have kept the name "India" being the land of the Indus Valley as it is.
Even in her book Empires of the Indus Alice Albinia writes that Pakistan could have been named "Industan" or kept the name India instead of Pakistan. Note: "India" in this case does not refer to the modern-day country by the same name, but the name given to the Indus Valley region-modern-day Pakistan by ancient European empires who arrived there.
Today I received an email about some movement pushing for renaming Pakistan Indus state or something of that sort.
I've seen similar videos on YouTube calling for Pakistan to be renamed India or given some similar name. Even one of my parents claims to prefer the name "confederation of Indus nations" instead of Pakistan.
My take on this is simple: I oppose it. You cannot rename a country after a geographic term. Should Egypt be renamed "confederation of Nile nations?" Should Turkey be renamed Anatolian republic or Anatolia? Note that Anatolia is still kept as the geographic name for the central and eastern regions of Turkey, while Turkey remains the state term. Anatolia specifically refers to Central and Eastern Turkey, not the Western parts.
People can argue that "confederation of Nile nations" is not appropriate since Egypt is a "nation-state" while Pakistan is not.
This argument is wrong. Many people think of North African Arabic-speaking countries as nation states when in fact they are home to many Berber-speaking tribes, including Egypt.
I'm not going to get into why most Egyptians speak Arabic today, but the fact is Arabic is not the only language of Egypt today, hence Egypt is not a "nation-state."
Taking up names of geographic terms could lead to many misconceptions and political turmoil.
Should Iran rename itself "confederation of Turkic, Semitic and Iranic nations?"
The name Iran is said to be derived from the ancient "Ary-an" which Indo-Iranic speaking people refereed to their land as "land of the Aryans."
This might not sound fair to Iran's Semitic and Turkic populations, but the fact is today all the various peoples of Iran are called Iranians due to their Iranian citizenship.
Iran is no longer seen as "land of the Aryans" but simply a country with a name derived from an ancient name meaning "land of the Aryans."
The same applies to Pakistan. Keeping the name Pakistan (land of the pure or land of purity) does not change the fact that the land is the Indus Valley. Keeping the Indus Valley as a geographical term for Pakistan is fine, but replacing the state term with a geographical one is not the best solution.
For one, Pakistanis are definitely not the pure decedents of people of the Indus Valley Civilization today, nor a are the Indo-European languages we speak proven to be related to the Indus Valley language.
Secondly most countries do not go by their geographic names. I've come across many Azerbaijanis claiming that they are only Turkic by language, but their country and people are still part of Transcaucasia by geography, race and culture.
Should then perhaps Azerbaijan be renamed South Caucasia or Southern Transcaucasia to better convince the world that it's people are not Turanians?
Finland is home to both Finns and Lappish/Saami people. Perhaps Finland should be named East Scandinavia to keep a neutral name balance?
The same applies to Pakistan. The name Pakistan is just a name of the country. It poses no harm or ethnocentric term, unlike the case of other countries that have names after their majority ethnic groups.
Why is it that Pakistan must take up a geographic term as it's name and all other countries stick with their original or given names? This idea serves no purpose and is simply senseless. There is nothing wrong with the name Pakistan as far as I can see.
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