Home Minister Amit Shah’s statement on Hindi being the one necessary language for India has stirred quite a big controversy in political circles. Shah, on the occasion of “Hindi Divas,” said: “Diversity of languages and dialects is the strength of our Nation. But there is a need for our Nation to have one language so that foreign languages don’t find a place. This is why our freedom fighters envisioned Hindi as Raj Bhasha”.
There is no surprise in Shah’s pronouncement, as the BJP/RSS
combine has long dreamed of converting all Indians into Hindi speaking subjects
who would adhere to their ardent philosophy of uniformity that is essential for
indoctrination and control. If there is anything that the Sangh Parivar group
detests the most, it is a free spirit and an open mindset. With a brute
majority in the Lok Sabha and a dispirited and divided opposition, they are
finding it an opportune moment to steamroll and impose their Hindi agenda on
India, especially on the people in the South.
There is a misconception among many in India that include
some in the NRI community that Hindi is the national language of India.
However, it is far from the truth, and according to the Indian constitution,
India does not have a national language but has two official languages, Hindi
and English, in which Government would conduct its business. Therefore, the
agenda in Shah’s statement is no mystery: to marginalize the regional languages
by blessing Hindi as the prominent language and to ultimately remove English as
an official language. In addition, Hindi
would likely be the medium of instructions in academia as well as the language
of proceedings in the Judiciary.
The latest data shows that Hindi is the mother tongue of 25%
of the Indians though 44% of the people say they know it. It is still short of
a ‘majority’ as it is propagated by the Hindi advocates as a reason for it to
be the National language. It reminds me of Annadurai, the erstwhile leader of
DMK and former Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu once quoted as saying “Is it because
majority speak Hindi? Then why Peacock is our national bird and not crow
despite being in the majority?” He may have said it out of his pride for the
Tamil, a Dravidian language which has a 4500-year history and is one of the
classical languages in the world. Nevertheless, it is another clear indication
as to how many Indians consider the richness and heritage of their own mother
tongues!
Although Hindi is now popular and spoken in many parts of
the South India today, thanks mostly to Bollywood, caste prejudice and cultural
arrogance once prevented it from full development. Ironically, it is Christian
missionaries such as William Carey who took it upon themselves to develop the
language with dictionaries and printing fonts. It is to be noted that the Bible
was the first prose printed in the language of Hindi. Also, in many Indian
languages, the first novel, drama, travelogue or biography was published by
these missionaries. In debating the virtues of Hindi or other vernaculars, the
contributions of these missionaries in the development of these languages and
the education of India’s backward castes are the most underreported story of
our time.
The most acrimonious debate in the Constituent assembly was
not on a Uniform civil code but on the question of the official language for
the Nation. If we are to go back in recent history, one significant set of
events took place in 1965 when Hindi became the official language of India. The
architects of modern India felt that India needed an official language as a unifying
force for such a diverse nation. However, they wanted to give several more
years to this effort as they were very conscious of the sentiment of non-Hindi
speaking folks, particularly in South India. However, some of the Hindi zealots
in the north were pressing hard to make that a reality soon although many of
their sons and daughters were sent to U.K. or USA for English Education and
higher professional studies. Protests and riots erupted across South India and
most of the violent confrontations occurred in Tamil Nadu where men immolated
themselves to resist the colonizing power of Hindi. Finally, the Central
Government relented and made English the sub-official language of the Nation.
When Amit Shah was talking about preventing foreign
languages finding a place in India, he is indeed training his guns on the
English language which may have become a stumbling block to the current regime
in their overall strategy in achieving their pan-India dream from Burma to
Afghanistan. The BJP’s incessant failure to take control of the power centers
in South India may have also factored in for their current pursuit for language
uniformity.
Those who are deriding English should pose and think of an
India without English! Despite the oppressive and exploitive British rule, the
English language brought us western education, modern nationalism,
self-determination, and democracy. Above all, it enabled India in developing
software technology or providing high-quality services to multi-national
companies in the west. Since most of the advanced computing instructions and
training materials were written in English, and the project management was
conducted using the same, Indians gained a natural advantage over others
gaining that expertise and excelling in it. Today, India exports about 150
billion dollars’ worth of software services that provided upward mobility to
millions of young people in the global arena. It was learning the language
English together with the restructuring of the Telecommunication policies by
our dynamic and visionary leader Rajiv Gandhi (with the assistance from Sam
Pitroda) that has catapulted India to the pinnacle of technology supremacy. It
has brought us fame and fortune and probably more respectability around the
globe. It is relevant here to recollect a conversation I have had with my
superior, an American, at the United Nations while working as the Chief
Technology Officer for the U.N. pension Fund: while discussing awarding a
software development contract to a vendor from India as opposed to a different
country, he said “give to Indians, at least, I can talk to them’. That answer
summarizes our success all across the global arena.
The imposition of Hindi on the Southern States will not only
create challenges to the federalist system of government but may also pose a
direct threat to the very unity of the Nation. However, a majoritarian
government with blind ambitions having utter disdain for the cultural diversity
and the linguistic differences of India, the pipe dream of promoting Hindi as
the official language at the expense of English takes on nightmarish
proportions. The constant stream of uneducated and unskilled labor from the
north flocking southwards to engage in low-end jobs the natives refused to do
is a poor advertisement for Amit Shah’s much-touted potential of the Hindi
language.
(writer is a former Chief Technology Officer of the United
Nations)
First published in India Abroad