Hindi imposition is an attack on country’s federalism: Historian

NT Correspondent

Bengaluru: When the most recent volume of the Report of the Official Language Committee headed by Home Minister Amit Shah was submitted to President Droupadi Murmu in September, some of the recommendations had sparked outrage because of their aggressive pro-Hindi stance.

One of the recommendations was that Hindi should be the medium of instruction in IITs, IIMs, and central universities in the Hindi-speaking states and there should be a deliberate attempt to reduce the usage of the English language in official communication and to increase the usage of Hindi.

This was seen as an attempt by the Union government to impose Hindi on nonHindi-speaking states. To discuss this issue, All India Save Education Committee (AISEC) organized a webinar against the Imposition of Hindi as the sole Official Language & Medium of Instruction and the removal of English.

The panel featured renowned historian and retired Professor A. Karunanandan, linguist and cultural activist Ganesh N. Devy, retired JNU professor Sachidanand Sinha and retired IIT Mumbai professor Ram Puniyani. The talk was moderated by Tarun Kanti Naskar of Jadavpur University who said that English was no longer a foreign language and has opened up the knowledge of the world.

“English played an important role in bringing people from all parts of the country together during the freedom struggle and the only people who deny it are the ones who never participated in it,” added Naskar, who believed that promoting Hindi as a link language is a regressive move by every measure.

Prof Karunanandan said that the imposition of Hindi attacks the federal nature of the country with the ruling party preferring a unitary state. “BJP all of a sudden seem to be interested in regional languages and are organizing a Tamil Sangamam in Kashi and trying to show that they care more about Tamil than the Tamil people, but they only intend to brainwash people with their Hindutva ideology,” he said, adding that we shouldn’t live in the past and that English was the language of modernity.

Ganesh Devy said that when Nationalism began in Europe in the 19th century, Germany and Italy were the countries that preferred having a monolanguage state which inevitably led to Fascism. “Hindi is the youngest language among the 22 languages included in Schedule 8 of the Indian constitution and is spoken by less than 30% of the population. If 70% of people don’t speak it, how can it be an effective link language?” he asked.

“India’s diversity isn’t a weakness. It is a myth that we aren’t progressing because we aren’t linguistically united,” said Prof Sachidanand Sinha as he replied most of the points in Hindi. Prof Ram Puniyani pointed out the dangers of conflating languages with religions.

“We have begun to think of Hindi as Hindu and Urdu as Muslim. But when we look at our neighbours it was the imposition of Urdu that split Pakistan into two, because the residents of East Pakistan were predominantly Bengali speakers,” said Puniyani