[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Narendra Modi government’s insistence on promoting Hindi in official work is not in sync with his avowed policy of working closely with the states, as the latter happen to be widely diversified and diversely multi-lingual in India.
The NDA government’s Hindi promotion drew a sharp reaction from a Meghalaya minister at a national conference in Delhi on Thursday. Meghalaya minister for urban affairs and labour M Ampareen Lyngdoh suggested that the Centre should factor in the ‘needs’ of non-Hindi speaking states and his contention was met with applause from a section of the participants, clearly reflecting the discomfort of a vast part of India with the Modi govt’s new agenda. This forced officials to clarify that the use of Hindi was not deliberate and several ministers simply chose to speak in their preferred language.Hindi happens to be the language of heartland India and efforts to impose it on the rest of the nation had led to bitter outcomes in the past. In the Northeast, there were instances of killing of innocents and a ban by rebel groups on Hindi films and music. 90 per cent of cinema halls in Assam stopped operating ever since a ban by Ulfa on the showing of Hindi films.
Similar sentiments rule in south India too. We have had instances of the Karnataka government enforcing a fiat enforcing Kannada in primary schools, and a ban on the release of non-Kannada films. In Mumbai the Shiv Sena and MNS have regularly enforced Marathi use in films and functions as the larger portion of Mumbai’s polyglot population today speak Hindi or the so-called Bambaiya/Mumbaiya - which is a blend of Marathi, Hindi, Indian English and some invented colloquial words - relegating the language of the land to the second place.
In Manipur, there was a ban on Hindi for years. Student bodies even slapped the ban on the use of Hindi in educational institutions as a mode of protest against the Armed Forces Special Powers Act even though just about 2 per cent population in the state is Hindi-speaking. The Hindi hatred is more palpable in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Orissa, West Bengal and even tiny Sikkim then the Northeast. A few years back, even the Sikhs of Delhi raised a voice, and got Punjabi granted a second language status in the national capital.
Yet, in spite of the love-hate relationships, Hindi remains the official language. Article 343 of the Constitution states that the official language of the Union (India) shall be Hindi in Devanagari script. Was Hindi accorded the official language status because the majority of states use Hindi as principal official language? The fact remains that even within the Hindi belt, it’s spoken in more than 10 variations. But in linguistic counts, from Rajasthani to Maithali, everything becomes Hindi. That is why at 380 million first-language speakers, Hindi stays unchallenged as the largest spoken language in the country.
At least, it remains so until English takes over. In fact, English has always been the official working language in the country. It sounds a bit incoherent though that many Indians have a problem with their official language. But then the seeds of this hatred were sown at the very foundation of India. For, language was the basis on which almost every Indian state was created in their formative stage: Kerala for Malyalam speakers, Tamil Nadu for Tamil speakers, Orissa for Oriya speakers, Andhra for Telugu speakers, Gujarat for Gujarati speakers and so on and so forth.
Language being one of the main seeds of a person or group’s ethnic identity, it is only fair that every state or linguistic group will try to safeguard and develop its own language. But the waves of in-migration that the country is witnessing in the wake of its economic resurgence have often put the smaller linguistic groups in the shadows of Hindi influences.
For, the Hindi speakers simply refuse to learn the language of the land when they migrate, unlike, say, a Malyalam-speaking Keralite or a Nepali-speaking Gorkha, who would quickly learn the local accent of Hindi and blend almost inseparably with a Delhiite or a Lucknowi. The Hindi speakers would, rather, create an island of their own wherever they go.
This happens, maybe, because most of these migrants are invariably low on literacy count or simply for their sense of superiority. But alienated as they are, when their islands expand, the ethnic groups often begin to see them as a threat, instead of developing any fellow-feeling. That’s why it’s so easy to spot or brand a Hindi-speaking person as such anywhere outside the Hindi heartland and it’s so hard to distinguish a Bengali from a Gujarati inside of it.
Thus grew the Hindi hatred, and it continues to grow. There is a very definite bottomline to this debate though. The India of tomorrow belongs to the polyglots and both the Hindi haters and the ‘arrogant’ among the Hindi speakers will end up as losers in this new India within their narrow boundaries.
If PM Modi’s focus is on developing the country through cooperative federalism, the government must quickly make amends, issue the necessary clarifications to end the confusion over Hindi use and acknowledge the ground reality as the move can be recipe for much distrust as well as disturbance.
