Motera Stadium on Patel is renamed Narendra Modi stadium

A day after world’s largest cricket stadium named Motera after Sardar Vallabh Bhai Patel at Ahmadabad was inaugurated on Wednesday, and its photographs went viral via a former English batsman calling it a “theatre of dreams” its name was changed.

The stadium is renamed on the prime minister of India. It is called Narendra Modi Stadium now. It has triggered a row of opinion mostly against the new naming. Interestingly, the renaming of the stadium was kept under wraps until after it was formally inaugurated.

Why has it been renamed after him has been clarified by none other than Home Minister Amit Shah, He said, “It was Modiji’s dream and it was his concept to have world’s largest cricket stadium while he was Gujarat’s chief Minister.”

Even the President of India who inaugurated the stadium, chipped in to clarify that “he was president of the Gujarat Cricket Association at that time.” The stadium is owned by Gujarat Cricket Association, where Amit Shah was president from 2014 till he became the home minister. Notably, the post lies vacant still. Also noteworthy is that Shah’s son Jay Shah is the honorary secretary of BCCI, a post that Mamata Banerjee has questioned in her attack on Shah after her nephew slapped a summon on him for making a derogatory remark on the Bengal CM earlier in a rally in Bengal.

Now, the reaming has triggered quite a reaction on the social media, from hilarious to anger to annoyance et al. Mainly because the PM is highly unpopular among the people advocating secular India than a religious one, two, it is an honour that is granted by someone else to a head of the nation than the head himself lapping it up and three, in an unwritten rule, any such coveted structure is renamed after an honourable but dead person.

Also, in the sports arena, it is anyway a rare precedence to have a stadium in the name of a sitting PM. This is basically a privilege of the dead as much as of those who had done something in the respective field. A case in a point is, St. John College of the Cambridge University had announced three Dr Manmohan Singh Scholarships for PhD students in 2010 because the former PM had studied economics at the college in the late 1950s. In 2018, the Ekana International Cricket Stadium in Uttar Pradesh was renamed after former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee after he had passed away. India rarely has any such renaming of a place on a living honourable person.

While the social media went viral with comments like “Is bar aik moorti apni bhi banwa le” (This time make your statue too) to a hilarious one in Hindi by Shiv Kumar who said, “World’s largest cricket stadium has been renamed after the nation’s fastest and destroying baller as Narendra Modi Stadium” to “Now hills and mountains’ names will also be changed. You keep on beating your chest” by an author called Amrendra Kishore. This ranged to almost a derogatory one, “The Iron made being replaced by a no man” while a poet and theatre director Ashok Lal said, “In the wake of the nationalistic pitch, glory and development achieved by renaming Motera, JNU should be renamed NMU, and so on.

The political frenzy over the change of the name is noteworthy.

While the Congress alleged, the renaming was an "insult" to Sardar Patel, as Shiv Sena leader and MP Priyanka Chaturvedi tweeted, "I am certain Hon PM will object to his name being used to write-over India's Iron Man.” The Rashtriya Janata Dal tweeted that the true colour of the self-styled ruler is stands exposed. This is also the first time in 70 years. But this will be no doubt the last time! Self-indulgence has yet to come down to shamelessness.

After such reactions the Union Minister Prakash Javadekar clarified that only the Motera stadium has been renamed and the complex continues to be named after sardar Patel. To which a facebook user Shyam Madhvan quipped, “I hear the Parliamentary Building is going to be renamed ‘Superiority Complex?”