India is streets ahead of US and Russia when it comes to renaming roads

Indians are no strangers to the practice of renaming roads to send out politically charged messages. Long before New Delhi’s Aurangzeb Road leapfrogged three centuries to become Dr A P J Abdul Kalam Road, the street on which the US consulate in Kolkata is situated morphed into Ho Chi Minh Sarani, at the height of the US war in Vietnam.

So, half a century after that, the Washington DC city council has not done anything startlingly original last month by deciding to rename the part of Wisconsin Avenue where the Russian Embassy stands as Boris Nemtsov Street, after the assassinated opponent of President Vladimir Putin. Particularly since the street on which the Russian ambassador’s residence is situated in Washington DC was renamed after Andrei Sakharov, nuclear physicist and dissident, in 1987.

Prominent US politicians have also been pushing for the renaming of the street in front of the Chinese Embassy as Liu Xiaobo Plaza after the late dissident and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. In that context, the recent plea by a senior Russian leader to name the lane next to the US Embassy such that its address becomes 1North American Dead End is quite mild. If the authorities in Moscow really want to annoy the Americans, they should rename the road after none other than US President Donald Trump.