Hindi is not India's national language. Mind it!

Did the Union home ministry pass an advisory asking all government departments to use Hindi as the medium of communication while using social media platforms? Is the government, after objections were raised from the South, backtracking on its order? Is the Centre now trying to ease the tension by saying that both English and Hindi will be used on official social media platforms?
At the moment these questions seem irrelevant because even if such an order has not been given, the damage is done and linguistic and regional passions have been fanned in different parts of the country, especially in the South.
If such an order has been given, all that the NDA government has managed to do is flog a dead horse back to life. To quote BJP-ally MDMK’s leader Vaiko: “The government should not indulge in activities that will provoke a sleeping tiger”.
If the order was given keeping in mind the sentiments of the Hindi-speaking population, it is bad politics on the side of a party that has shown great political acumen in the general elections and that has been voted into government on the promise of ‘development for all’. It’ll suffice to say that this needless controversy has managed to open an old wound.
India’s recent history has seen several instances of anti-Hindi protests. From the late 1930s till the 1980s there have been at least three major anti-Hindi protests in Tamil Nadu, when at different times the Centre tried to make the learning and use of Hindi mandatory. The protests in 1965 are by far the most violent, which lasted for more than two months and saw more than 70 people killed. The agitation stopped only after then Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri assured the continuance of English as the medium of Centre-state communication.

M Karunanidhi (File photo)

During the 1986 language riots, many DMK leaders, including M Karunanidhi, were arrested. So charged was the atmosphere, more than 20 people committed suicide by self-immolation.
Events are unlikely to take such a drastic turn today, but nevertheless, such an advisory thickens the air with a discomforting tension.
The fallacy of such a move is clear in the answer to this question: Which was the language used in the Union home ministry advisory sent to a government office in Salem in Tamil Nadu or Guntur in Andhra Pradesh or Thrissur in Kerala?
On Friday evening the government clarified that the advisory was only meant for Hindi-speaking states. The question that then should be asked is: Why only this focus on Hindi? What about the other recognised languages in India?
India has got a rich culture and heritage and even if some see the British rule as an aberration in an otherwise ‘glorious’ past, the fact remains that English — the language used by the British — serves as one of the important medium of communication between different states.
The government could have done without this controversy, especially when there are many other pressing issues at hand.
(This article appeared in Hindustan Times on June 20)

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.