The Suhrawardy confusion: how India's renaming politics is rewriting Muslim political memory

In late June, a question over who lies beneath a Lucknow intersection spilled into the open, exposing the seams in India's most ambitious historical-renaming project. The Hindu Mahasabha, the BJP's ideological ancestor, has for decades claimed that a decapitated body exhumed from a city drain in 1925 was that of the 19th-century Hindu monk Swami Shraddhanand. The plot of land at the crossing was named after him in 2018 by the BJP's state government. The Indian Express, reporting from Lucknow on 22 June 2026, found that the Swami Shraddhanand Intercolony site sits some distance from the city's Hazratganj police station, where the standard historical account places the recovery of the body. Three separate gazette notifications from the Uttar Pradesh government, dating from the 1890s, the 1930s and 1980s, point in a different direction: they record the same intersection as the site of the assassination of former Bengal premier Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy. The 22 June article itemises the discrepancies in plain detail. Each one is a small administrative record. Together they amount to a working record of confusion about which Muslim political memory is being overwritten, and by whom.[^1]

The two Suhrawardys

The Bengali-speaking reader is likely to think first of the scholar and diplomat Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose's contemporary, Muhammad Suhrawardy, the barrister from Calcutta who served as the last premier of undivided Bengal and was killed in Dhaka in 1964. That Suhrawardy is a settled figure in South Asian political history: he presided over the United Front government in 1946, was one of the architects of partition as a counsel at the Mountbatten mission, and was a founder of the Awami League. The UP government has renamed or repurposed sites in Lucknow after a different Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, a lesser-known figure whose name happens to share the honorific. The Indian Express's reporting treats the Lucknow-side Suhrawardy with reserve. He is identified, on the basis of a 2018 BJP government notification and the three gazette texts it cites, as a local political figure from the twilight years of British rule whose killing at the intersection is the trigger for the renaming. The shared name has produced a category error in public memory. The mainstreaming Suhrawardy, by an order of magnitude the better-documented figure, is the one non-specialist readers will assume the street is about. The Lucknow figure is, on the evidence assembled, someone else.

What the gazettes actually show

The mechanics of the confusion sit in three documents. The Uttar Pradesh government's land-record branch has gazette notifications from 1894, a colonial-era list of notified sites, the 1930s, a separate administrative register running in parallel after independence, and 1981, when the post-Inquisition land-records survey consolidated older claims. Each one places a Suhrawardy-related killing at the crossing the BJP government renamed Swami Shraddhanand Intercolony in 2018. The Indian Express reviewed each gazette text and walked the site. The Swami Shraddhanand claim, by contrast, traces to a Hindu Mahasabha petition filed in the early 1990s and repeated by BJP legislators ahead of the 2018 notification. The Mahasabha's evidentiary basis is unpublished. The gazettes are state records. The discrepancy is, on its face, an evidentiary one. The Indian Express does not call it a fraud. It calls it a confusion. The distinction matters. A fraud implies coordinated deceit. A confusion of this kind is what the movement produces when it speeds ahead of its own paperwork.

The renaming machine

The BJP's stewardship of historical sites in UP is part of a national pattern visible across the seven years of state government in Lucknow and the central government's parallel renaming of Mughal-era landmarks: the Mughal Sarai junction in Uttar Pradesh's Chandauli district, the Allahabad junction, the Aurangabad city. The Indian Express's reporting is consistent in describing this work as a deliberate historical-reclamation project rather than a piecemeal administrative exercise. The argument inside the BJP, outlined in party press conferences and think-tank contributions alike, is that post-Independence India inherited a memorial landscape shaped by Nehruvian accommodation with Muslim political memory and that the renaming programme restores that landscape to one more representative of the Hindu majority. That argument has popular support. It is also a project of historical editing, and like all such projects, it depends on what the editorials leave out. The Suhrawardy-Swami Shraddhanand seam is the kind of seam such editing produces. The record of one Muslim political figure's death at the site is gazetted three times. The record of a Hindu monk's death there is asserted but not gazetted. The 2018 notification collapses the two and names the site after the latter.

What the seam is diagnostic of

A single contested intersection in Lucknow is not the renaming programme. It is, however, the kind of artifact the programme leaves when it outruns the documentation that would, in an evidence-based culture, precede it. The BJP state government's expansionary naming of monuments, roads and parks in UP is the most ambitious historical-reclamation project any Indian ruling party has ever run. The Suhrawardy confusion is a small window onto the cost of running such a project at speed: gazetted Muslim political memory in Lucknow gets renamed into Hindu ascetic memory without the underlying record being reconciled. The cost is borne by readers of history and by the citizens who navigate the renamed city. It is borne most pointedly by Indian Muslims, for whom the renaming of a documented assassination site in a major city is part of a wider pattern of monumental displacement. The Indian Express's June 2026 reporting sits inside a wider press environment, including Scroll, The Wire and the Hindustan Times editorial page, that has been tracking these discrepancies case-by-case. The mainstreaming Suhrawardy, dead in Dhaka in 1964, is unaffected by the Lucknow renaming. The Lucknow Suhrawardy, a local political figure buried somewhere near the intersection, is in the line of fire.

What to watch next

The BJP's UP government has, in the past, responded to documented discrepancies in its renaming programme with one of two tactics: either acknowledging the historiographical objection and quietly restoring the older name, or letting the discrepancy sit unresolved on the grounds that the new name has entered popular use. The Indian Express's June 2026 report invites the second response as a matter of routine. The Lucknow corporation and the UP government's archives department have, on past form, six to twelve months to address the discrepancy either way. The timeline is short. The Indian Express's reading of the gazettes has not, at the time of writing, been formally accepted or rejected by the state. Until it is, the Lucknow intersection will continue to bear a name whose evidentiary basis has been publicly disputed. Reading the three gazettes in 2026, the seam is already visible. What the responsible authorities do about it is the next test.[^1]

[^1]: Sources: Indian Express, 22 June 2026, "Who is buried at the Swami Shraddhanand Intercolony site? The gazettes tell a different story." Via Indian Express Telegram, with corroboration in the party's 2018 land-record notification. Desk note: Monexus read the renamed-site story as a small but diagnostic entry in a much larger renaming campaign, and we kept the framing narrow to what the Indian Express's reporting actually supports. The BJP's national renaming programme is its own, larger story, with its own evidentiary record, and it deserves a separate treatment when the documentation accumulates.