What's in a name?

Land at Delhi's airport and you are in Indira Gandhi's territory. Drive into town past the Rajiv Chowk metro station, read about the Indira Awas Yojana, the Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojana, the Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission. A first-time visitor could be forgiven for concluding the capital belongs to one family.

In October 2010, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh did something quietly remarkable about it. Through Cabinet Secretary K.M. Chandrasekhar, he wrote to his ministers asking that the names of leaders like Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi be used "very sparingly" for new schemes — the practice, the letter said, had become "widespread and indiscriminate." His argument was not that the family didn't deserve honour; it was that slapping their names on failing programmes insulted their memory rather than preserving it.

The letter (described in detail in this India Today column) was also read as something more: a prime minister trying to stop alliance partners from building larger-than-life images of their own regional leaders the same way.

Whether 10 Janpath welcomed the restraint is anyone's guess. But the episode revealed the fault line in Indian public life — between honouring history and being owned by it. A country that names everything after three prime ministers from one family isn't remembering. It's avoiding the question of what comes next.