Uttar Pradesh: Mulayam’s Hindi is Akhilesh’s English

'Son, the Hindi for ... SIM card is...' 

Recycling is an environment-friendly process and old things, as much as possible, should be recycled. However, it’s another thing to recycle old ideas, especially the redundant ones. Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav’s call to ban the use of English language in Parliament should be seen in this light. Mr Yadav was speaking at a function at Etawah in Uttar Pradesh where he said that many leaders had a ‘double standard’ when it came to Hindi, as they asked for votes in Hindi but spoke in English in Parliament. His suggestion to use one’s mother tongue in Parliament is a flawed one and does not act in the favour of his idea to promote Hindi. The mother tongue of more than half of the members of the Lok Sabha is not Hindi and if one were to take heed of the SP leader’s suggestion, there would be more than 20 different languages spoken on the floor of the House. The resultant scene can only be described as pandemonium.
To look at English as a vestige of our colonial past is wrong, as today the language belongs to all its users, both native and non-native speakers. In a multi-lingual country like India, where dialects of the same language change every 100 kilometres, English is the lingua franca and linguam primarium. English is a thread that connects various states and cultures. Many states in India have suffered because of an aversion towards English — the case of West Bengal is an example. India’s IT/ITES revolution owes its success a great deal to the language. Many of the political leaders who talk about the need to shun English make it a point to send their children to English-medium schools and to universities in the US, the UK or Australia.
This fall back on the attitude towards the usage of English by the Samajwadi Party leader shows the party’s paucity of ideas in this election season. Uttar Pradesh, where the party runs the government, has recently been in the news for the wrong reasons like the communal tension in Muzaffarnagar, which saw many people die and scores of people living in relief camps months after the riots. The healthcare scenario, with a high infant mortality rate, is not very impressive and there is a lot of scope for improvement. Rather than focusing on these and other pressing issues, Mulayam Singh’s statement has shown that the hope placed on a young Akhilesh Yadav as the chief minister of the most populous state in the country was misplaced. The young chief minister of UP, who himself holds a degree from the University of Sydney, Australia, must work towards dispelling the impression that his government and party are resorting to retrograde ways to reach out to the people and instead take all the steps towards putting the state on the development path. Shunning English is not a step in the right direction.