Scholars, law experts, linguists and academicians apart from language activists from six States took part in a conference on ‘language rights in federal state’, at World Tamil Sangam, on Saturday, here.
Justice D. Hariparanthaman, former judge of High Court of Madras, who gave a lecture on language right as per the Constitution, said, “to achieve equal rights for all languages, changes have to be made at the Constitutional level.”
“There are certain Articles in the Constitution that accord extra preference to Hindi over other regional languages in the country,” he pointed out.
“When the UN General Assembly allows so many languages and is equipped with facilities to translate all of them, why cannot the Indian Parliament allow members to speak in their mother tongues. With such advancement in technology today, translating in multiple languages is not an issue,” he added.
He further stated that unity comes from equality and the Indian State should first ensure equality for all regional languages. “The Union should ensure that people of non-Hindi speaking States feel that equal importance is being accorded to their languages,” he added.
