A government body in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh on Wednesday claimed its website had been hacked after social media users flagged that it referred to famous Urdu poet Akbar Allahabadi as Akbar Prayagraj, Scroll.in reported.
The name was restored on Wednesday.
Born in 1846, Syed Akbar Hussain used the nom de plume Akbar Allahabadi as he was born in a town close to the Uttar Pradesh city.
The state government of Yogi Adityanath — a hardliner from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — had changed the name of the city of Allahabad to Prayagraj in October 2018.
On Tuesday, several social media users shared screenshots of a page on the Uttar Pradesh Higher Education Service Commission’s website that showed the pen names of him and two other poets — Tegh Allahabadi and Rashid Allahabadi — as “Pragyagraj”.
From Akbar Allahabadi to Akbar Prayagraji, thanks to the name changing in #UttarPradesh.
This on a government website. https://t.co/gyQ9iUDObW pic.twitter.com/3fnPkZkrne
— Gulam Jeelani (@jeelanikash) December 28, 2021
The names appeared under the “About Prayagraj” section on the website of Uttar Pradesh Higher Education Service Commission, an autonomous body under the state government.
A leader of the BJP, Rita Bahuguna Joshi, said the flub may have been a human error, “because one cannot change a person’s pen name like that”, The Print reported.
On Wednesday, the commission’s chairperson Ishwar Charan Vishvakarma told local media that a complaint has been filed on the matter with the cyber cell of city police.
“It was evidently a handiwork of some miscreants expressing their apparent resentment over the change of name of Allahabad,” Vishvakarma said.
Several people on social media criticised the name change.
