In a country of over one billion people speaking almost as many tongues... the unthinkable is about to happen … building a ‘United India’ by speaking Hindi ! Gone are the days when India was likened to a garden of many ‘different flowers and fragrance’, the days of ‘unity in diversity’ surely this also meant choosing your ‘preferred’ language of speech anywhere in the country to communicate sensibly.
Since taking office as India’s PM last month, Narendra Modi has taken a clear stand in support of Hindi, pushing for it to replace English as the preferred language of the capital’s urbane and golf-playing bureaucrats. Hindi and English are India’s two official languages for government business, although India’s constitution recognizes a total of 22 languages. Modi’s government has ordered its officials to use Hindi on social media accounts and in government letters. Its not the wrong or right that is being debated here. But the brazen ‘totalitarian’ manner in which the decision has been roled out without any space for ‘grace’ and consideration of other languages that the constitution supports such as Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi etc to name a few leaves one speechless!
DMK Chief on Thursday slammed India’s home ministry for its social media diktat. “No one can deny it’s beginning to impose Hindi against one’s wish. This would be seen as an attempt to treat non-Hindi speakers as second-class citizens,” television channels quoted DMK chief M Karunanidhi as saying.
Having personally been belittled for not being able to speak Hindu fluently, what Karunanidhi states is true. I know the feeling when a taxi driver reprimands you for not conversing in Hindi, or a vegetable vendor refuses to acknowledge you in a crowd of shoppers because you speak Hindi a little differently.
For Kiren Rijuju, the honorable union minister from Arunachal Pradesh to come across so belligerent and say that “we will give importance to all other languages” is hardly comforting. Clearly he does not know why at least in Nagaland for generations the populace have had a mental block to learning Hindi …the language has always been associated with the presence of the Armed Forces and little children would be threatened with scoldings that the soldiers would take them away if they did’nt stop crying or obey their elders.
The situation is quite the reverse in Arunachal Pradesh where in the vast landscape the group that one is bound to encounter most often is the Army. Not surprisingly Hindi developed as the common lingua franca for the masses, but this is not to say that when a visitor is unable to speak Hindi you get a hostile reception. With the centre’s latest dictat, one is’nt too sure anymore of ‘acceptability’ and you will ‘have to mind your language’ now in the country.
It is indeed tragic that a language as beautiful as Hindi, is being literally forced out of people’s mouth. While it is important that citizens of the country know the national language, how can it be made compulsory for it to be spoken as well. What about one’s own mother tongue? Are we expected to leave these behind when we walk into government offices and buildings and only converse in Hindi.
There are so many other ways the BJP led NDA government could have enticed the countrymen to veer around to speaking Hindi.
Even without this recent dictat huge strides in the last decade has been made with many Naga youth learning Hindi professionally to enhance their careers and for job opportunities.
What the government must remember is that Anti-Hindi protests in India date back to before the country gained independence in 1947 from former colonial ruler Britain. Hindi speakers are concentrated in India’s northern and central regions, home to the country’s two most populous states and where the BJP picked up most of its parliamentary seats in the election. It is the mother tongue of just over 40% of Indians, the latest government data show.
And In the 1960s the southern DMK party launched a campaign against the government’s plan to make Hindi the sole official language, during which Hindi books and effigies of a “Hindi demoness” were burnt on village bonfires.
Modi spoke in Hindi and used interpreters in meetings with South Asian leaders last month, and addressed the Bhutanese parliament in Hindi during his first official overseas trip last week. The BJP has long championed Hindi as a uniting force for India but official accounts on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook , show English preference over Hindi .India’s booming social media scene remains dominated by English, with even Modi still mostly using that language to communicate with the 4.9 million people who follow him there.
Perhaps a few months down the line we’ll get to know who gets to have the last word and how speaking Hindi will unite the country.
