Despite a long and troubled history of rejection, Hindi language chauvinism is on the march again in BJP-ruled India. Prime minister Narendra Modi and members of the Union cabinet seem unaware that 56 percent of the nation’s population is unacquainted with Hindi. On August 9, Ms. Kanimozhi Karunanidhi, a member of Parliament from Tamil Nadu, was insulted by a woman officer of the Central Industrial Security Force at Chennai airport for not being familiar with Hindi, “the national language”. On August 21, an official of the Union Ayush (traditional medicines) ministry asked government officials unfamiliar with Hindi to leave his training class.
Curiously the reaction of chief ministers and politicians in India’s southern non-Hindi speaking states to this concerted effort to impose Hindi — the lingua franca of the country’s most socio-economically backward BIMARU (Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh) states which grudgingly host more than half of the country’s 1.30 billion citizens — has been muted, if not of resigned acceptance. This despite the south having bitterly resisted imposition of Hindi as the national language in the 1960s. At that time when Hindi was declared the national and official language, there were protests and threats of secession in the southern states.
The objection of peninsular India states to adoption of Hindi as the national language is that it would give citizens of BIMARU states a natural advantage in bagging jobs in government and academia and to dominate the professions. On the other hand, adoption of English creates a level playing field as everybody has an equal chance to learn it. Moreover, since the geographical spread of English is greater than of Hindi, it’s best for inter-state communications. These arguments are as valid today as they were half a century ago
Despite this historical backdrop, the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 has resurrected the medium of instruction and three languages issues. In essence, it recommends that over half the country’s 260 million in school children learn in Hindi “up to class V or preferably until class VIII” and the other half in 20 disparate languages, and years later graduate with weak English communication skills. The policy also mandates that children should learn three languages, “two of which should be Indian languages”, implying that English, or more accurately Inglish, is not an Indian language. The design is that all children will opt for Hindi as one of the three.
The formulators of NEP 2020 seem ignorant of the fact that the medium of instruction issue has been settled by the Supreme Court. In KAMS vs. Government of Karnataka (2014), the apex court decreed that choice of the medium of instruction in school education is entirely of children’s parents. Unsurprisingly, the ruling AIADMK party in Tamil Nadu — ironically a BJP ally — has rejected forthwith, NEP 2020’s three languages prescription reiterating the state government’s established two compulsory languages — English and Tamil — in K-12 education with all other languages optional. Thus through continuous resurrection of well-settled issues, the country’s benighted neta-babu brotherhood is draining the energy of the nation.