The Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s statement recently, saying that Hindi should replace English as the “link language” and that the Government’s work will increasingly be in Hindi, has set the proverbial cat among the Southern pigeons. The “Hindi-Hindutva-Hindustan” ideology that he represents has historically been impatient with the notion of Indian multilingualism, which it sees as a babel undermining national unity rather than the proud showcase of diversity that our constitutional nationalism celebrates. It has been a long-standing policy plank of the Hindutva movement that Hindi, the language of the northern and central Indian States, where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has sunk its deepest roots, should be the ‘national language’ of India. BJP MPs have frequently risen in the national parliament to demand that their preference be made law.
Part of ‘Hindi promotion’
Mr. Shah’s is only the latest salvo of several efforts by the Modi government to promote Hindi. These include: the imposition of Hindi names on Central government programmes and schemes (Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana, and the like) instead of translations or ‘neutral’ English labels; a ‘parliamentary committee’s proposal to make the use of Hindi mandatory for MPs and Union Ministers; making Hindi a compulsory subject for Central Board of Secondary Education schools across the country; re-lettering milestones on national highways in Hindi instead of English’; the use of Hindi in airport announcements; the Central government issuing media advertisements in Hindi, and launching ‘promotional campaigns exclusively in the Hindi script’, even when the words used may be from different Indian languages; and the practice of renaming well-known occasions or festivities only in Hindi or Sanskrit, such as Teacher’s Day as Guru Purnima.
