Preserving India's harmonious symphony of linguistic pluralism

 

Preserving India's harmonious symphony of linguistic pluralism

Amit Shah addressing the 37th Parliamentary Official Languages Committee meeting on April 7,2022, urged the use of Hindi as the lingua franca, rather than English in inter-State communications. He said Hindi should replace English and that when citizens who speak other languages, communicate with each other, it should   be in the ‘language of India’.  This has ignited the fear of Hindi being imposed on the non-Hindi speaking states.

 

The Eighth Schedule to the Constitution recognizes 22 major languages spoken in India. The 1961 Census reports mentioned a total of 1,652 mother tongues, out of which 184 mother tongues had more than 10,000 speakers. As per the 2011 Census Hindi is identified as primary language in 12 of 34 states and union territories.  The 2011 Census data, according to Prof. Ganesh N. Devy, “was highly doctored. It presents Hindi as the mother tongue of over 52 crore people by subsuming more than 5 crore claimants of Bhojpuri and more than 9 core speakers of nearly 61 other languages- from Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Haryana, Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh. The Hindi is probably spoken by not more than 30% of the population, but it is not the mother tongue for the remaining 70%.”     

 

Hindi is not a national language. The Section 343 and sub-sections (1) and (2) of the Constitution state that ‘the official language of the Union shall be Hindi…for a period of fifteen years from the commencement of the Constitution, the English language shall continue to be used for all the official purposes of the Union.”  To ally the fear of Hindi being imposed on the non-Hindi speaking states, Prime Minister Nehru assured on the floor of the Lok Sabha on August 7, 1959: “there must be no imposition…because I do not wish the people of non-Hindi areas to feel that they are forced to correspond in the Hindi language. They can correspond in English. So, I could have it as an alternate language as long as people require it and the decision for that I would leave not to the Hindi-knowing people, but to the non-Hindi-knowing people”. To give legal status to his assurance, the Official Languages Act was passed in 1963. The Act provides for the “Continuance of English language for official purposes of the Union and for use in Parliament”. The Section 3 states: “Notwithstanding the expiration of the period of fifteen years from the commencement of the Constitution, the English language may, as from the appointed day, continue to be used, in addition to Hindi for all the official purposes of the Union… and for the transaction of business in Parliament”.

 

As the day of switching over to Hindi as the sole official language approached (26 January 1965), the anti-Hindi movement gained momentum in Madras with increased support from college students. On 25 January, a full-scale riot broke out in Madurai. The riots spread all over Madras State, continued unabated for the next two months, and were marked by violence, arson, looting, police firing and lathi charges. The Congress government of Bhakatavatsalam called in paramilitary forces to quell the agitation, resulting in the deaths of some 70 persons, including two policemen. To calm the situation, Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, in his broadcast on All India Radio, February 11,1965, promised to honour Nehru's assurance and affirmed that the English would continue to be used for center-state and inter-state communications and that the English would continue to be used as the official language as long as the non-Hindi speaking states wanted. The riots subsided after his assurance, as did the students' agitation. The anti-Hindi agitation led to major political changes in the state of Madras.  The DMK won the 1967 assembly election and the Congress Party lost power. The ‘King Maker’ Kamaraj- the President of the Congress- got defeated by a student. And the Congress never returned to power in Tamil Nadu since then. The Official Languages Act was amended in 1967 by the Indira Gandhi government to guarantee the use of Hindi and English as official languages, thus ensuring the policy of bilingualism of the Indian Republic.  

 

Hindi can never become a sole official language of the Union of India, even if majority of Indian population eventually speaks Hindi.  Any attempt to impose Hindi shall be resisted tooth-and-nail by the non- Hindi speaking people, particularly of Bengal and South India and the North East. India is a mosaic of multi-lingual culture, each state preserving and taking pride in its unique linguistic cultural identity.  Bengali has a rich language tradition and culture. More so the Southern languages. Because of their rich literary background, the South Indian languages-Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada- are recognized as the classical languages along with Sanskrit and Odia. Hindi is relatively a new modern language. Telugu is known as the ‘Italian of the East’, while the Tamil is the oldest Indian language. The aggressive and unreasonable belief that one’s own language is better than all others and excessive or prejudiced support for it may further intensify the linguistic chauvinism practiced by states. The attempt to impose Hindi as the national language should be seen as the work of Hindi chauvinists.

 

The three-language formula offers solution to the vexed issue of official language. The formula, as enunciated in the 1968 National Policy Resolution by the Indira Gandhi government, provides for the study of Hindi, English and a modern Indian language (preferably one of the southern languages) in schools in the Hindi speaking states and Hindi, English and the regional language in the non-Hindi speaking States.  In several Hindi-speaking states, Sanskrit became the third language instead of a modern language. The purpose of the three-language formula of promoting inter-state communications is defeated. A non-Hindi-speaking state like Tamil Nadu adopted a two-language policy-Tamil and English- and did not implement the three-language formula. The North East Students’ Organisation-representing the students’ community of eight North Eastern States-in its recent letter to Amit Shah had opposed imposition of Hindi as a compulsory subject, as ‘such a move will not usher in unity but will be a tool to create apprehensions’.

 

It is a fallacy that a national language is necessary to promote unity and national pride. The patriotism has nothing to do with a national langue, it essentially comes from deep understanding of one’s country’s history and its diverse composite culture and respecting that. We should learn a lesson from our neighbouring countries. The imposition of one language in neglect of the others in a mufti-lingual state proved to be disastrous.  Pakistan and Sri Lanka are examples of how stubbornness over language ruined nations.

 

Pakistan, after the partition, like India, was a multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic state. In 1948, Jinnah, who himself hardly spoke Urdu, tried Islamisation of East Pakistan, by imposing Urdu as the sole national language at the expense of the rich Bengali. As he said: “there can only be one state language if the component parts of this state are to march forward in unison and that can only be Urdu”. This led to violent Bengali language movement in East Pakistan, and ultimately resulting in its breaking-away from Pakistan and the birth of Bangladesh.  Similarly, The Sinhala Only Act, of 1956 triggered intense enmity and distrust between the Sinhalis and the Tamils in Sri Lanka, leading to the civil war and the secessionist movement by the Tamil militant organisations like the LTTE that ruined the country.  The Act replaced English with Sinhala as the sole official language, leading to alienation of Tamils and Muslims who constitute about 30% of total population.

 

In contrast, the countries that accommodated linguistic diversity had prospered. Singapore has a multi-ethnic- population, with the Chinese constituting nearly 70% of its population. There was immense pressure to declare the Chinese as the official language. But Lee Kaun Yew -the architect of modern Singapore- refused to buckle and opted for English as the official language. The proficiency in English has made the city-state a global business hub today.  In 1965, when the Chinese Chamber of Commerce urged him to have Chinese as the national and official language of Singapore, he told them: “You should be mad, and I don’t want to hear any more of that …If you do, you are entering the political arena. I have to fight you …What would the Malays be, and the Indians what future would they have? The country would fall apart…” Such was the visionary leadership of Lee Kaun. And in South Africa, the national anthem of this Rainbow Nation, since 1997, is a five-language lyrical composition, making it the most unique anthem in the world. The languages are Xhosa, Zulu, Sesotho, Afrikaans and English. South Africa has emerged as a leader of the African continent due to its accommodative linguistic policy.

 

India should follow the example of Singapore and South Africa, and not the disastrous linguistic chauvinism of Pakistan and Sri Lanka that ruined them.  Let us preserve our harmonious symphony of linguistic pluralism.