With one statement, the Home Minister has divided the country and achieved the opposite of what he professedly intended (Front page, “Only Hindi can work to unite country, asserts Amit Shah”, Sept. 15). The Central government represents the entire country. Just because its offices are located in a Hindi-speaking area it does not mean all Indians are for Hindi. There are two myths here that need to be cleared. First, Hindi is not the national language. All the languages listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution are equally important. Indians not speaking Hindi outnumber those speaking the language. Second, English is not a foreign language. It is only a language of foreign origin. It has become our own over the more than 200 years of its use. As it was introduced as a language of administration all over India, it had unified the country. Now, English-language papers and magazines are published and read throughout India, unlike other-language publications that are confined to particular regions. English has conferred immense benefits on our people. It is a doorway to knowledge. It is not for nothing that C. Rajagopalachari called it the “gift of goddess Saraswati”.
B.G. Baliga,
Thrissur, Kerala
At a time when the country is facing an unprecedented economic slowdown, it is unfortunate that the Home Minister has broached the subject of making Hindi the national language. May be it is a tactic to divert people’s attention from the faltering economy due to the policies of his own government. The massive parliamentary majority that the Bharatiya Janata Party enjoys should not make it lose its head and cause it to become arrogant, autocratic and non-amenable to reasoning.
Tharcius S. Fernando,
Chennai
No doubt Hindi has a rich literary tradition. It is also much easier to learn compared with many other Indian languages. Further, over the last seven decades, due to a host of factors including the universal reach of Hindi films and TV programmes and the internal migration of people for livelihood and other reasons, more and more people from non-Hindi speaking States today are in a position to communicate in Hindi. That said, any official attempt to push Hindi down the throats of non-Hindi speaking people can only give rise to avoidable problems. The history of countries such as Pakistan and Sri Lanka should teach governments that in a multilingual country, privileging one language at the cost of others would amount to inviting trouble. Fostering unity is a noble objective. But to think that unity can come only out of uniformity is highly fallacious.
G.G. Menon,
Tripunithura, Kerala
I love Hindi but imposing it as a national language and creating an unequal advantage to naturalised Hindi speakers is gross discrimination and cannot be a unifier. The government, having no reform or development measures to boast of, is targeting people’s sentiments. But this time, it has scored a self-goal that may cost it electorally in the future. The Congress’s history in this regard should be instructive.
Bidyut Kumar Chatterjee,
Faridabad, Haryana
The Union Home Minister’s push for ‘Hindi for all’ is in keeping with his party’s obsession with Hindi and its project of promoting the native language of the ‘Hindi belt’ at the cost of other Indian languages. His phraseology, “efforts to expand Hindi’s reach to different parts of the country”, is just a wily politician’s euphemism for ‘Hindi imposition’. His insistence on thrusting Hindi down the throat of non-Hindi speaking people under the guise of a unifying language will do the country more harm than good. It will diminish the non-Hindi speaking people’s sense of belonging to the nation and make them feel almost as second-class citizens. While batting for Hindi as “common language of country”, he was big-hearted enough to let non-Hindi speakers to communicate with their children and co-workers in their mother tongues! But it has not occurred to him that imposing Hindi on non-Hindi speaking people is as bad or good as imposing, say, Tamil or Kannada on Hindi-speaking people. We can say with conviction that ‘unity in diversity’ is the bedrock on which the edifice of our ‘house’ (read, ‘nation’) is built and the talisman that holds it together. Thanks to the principle of equality of everyone and everything enshrined in the Constitution as one of its basic features, ‘balkanisation’ is the last word we think of. India is a diverse and disparate country and its linguistic diversity is as real as its religious and cultural diversities. India is a Union of linguistic states and not ‘Hindia’. It is futile to try to homogenise a heterogeneous country of continental proportions. Uniformity is not the same as unity. If Hindi imposition comes, cultural invasion cannot be far behind. This explains the strength of spontaneous resistance to Hindi imposition. It is a plain fact that Hindi imposition will put the non-Hindi speaking people at a distinct disadvantage educationally and economically. Incidentally, those who do not speak Hindi outnumber those who speak Hindi. The three-language formula has served us well. Why tinker with it and try to substitute it with ‘one nation, one language’ policy in the ‘Babel’? In a free country people must be free to decide which language to learn or not to learn. While the freedom of choice is paramount, the state or government cannot formulate a language policy against the will of ‘linguistic minorities’ who constitute the majority of the national population.
G. David Milton,
Maruthancode, Tamil Nadu
