Hours after Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Adityanath announced that the state’s Faizabad district will be renamed Ayodhya, the Gujarat government on Tuesday said it will consider changing Ahmedabad’s name to Karnavati, PTI reported.

“People still have a feeling that Ahmedabad should be renamed as Karnavati,” said Deputy Chief Minister Nitin Patel. “If we get the required support to overcome the legal hurdles, we are always ready to change the name of the city.”

Ahmedabad is India’s first and only city to have received the “World Heritage” tag by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation.

Karnavati was a city on the banks of the Sabarmati river that was established by Chalukya ruler Karna of Anhilwara (modern-day Patan) after waging a successful war against a Bhil king. In 1411, Sultan Ahmed Shah laid the foundation of a new walled city near Karnavati and named it Ahmedabad.

“We can think of changing the name at an appropriate time,” Patel told reporters in the state capital Gandhinagar.

The Congress criticised Patel’s remarks and said the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party was using the matter as another “poll gimmick”. “For the BJP, issues like construction of a Ram temple in Ayodhya and renaming Ahmedabad as Karnavati are the means to get votes of Hindus,” said Gujarat Congress spokesperson Manish Doshi. “BJP leaders dump such issues after coming to power. They only cheated Hindus all these years.”

Last month, the Uttar Pradesh Cabinet had approved a proposal to rename Allahabad as Prayagraj. In June, Adityanath’s government had renamed the Mughalsarai railway station as Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyay station.