Conflict erupts

A language war appears to have erupted nationwide following the announcement made by union home minister Amit Shah, chairperson of the Parliamentary Official Language Committee, that Hindi will be made compulsory in all the eight north eastern states up to Class X. Amit Shah said Hindi would be made compulsory up to Class 10 in the region’s schools. He also said 22,000 teachers have been recruited to teach Hindi in the north-eastern States. What Shah attempted to do was literally setting the cat among the pigeons and for which the reactions indicate the reasons for stoking up the divisive debate. Shah’s announcement had all political parties, alliance partners as well as non-NDA opposition parties up in arms. All north eastern states are either ruled by the BJP or in alliance with other political parties, so there had been less openness in opposing the move. However, besides NPF in Nagaland, part of the NDPP-BJP alliance, no non-BJP alliance partner in the NDA made noise though the non-NDA opposition as well as influential organisations expressed vehement opposition to such a move. Perhaps Amit Shah wanted to test the waters over an earlier attempt by the Modi government to push towards making Hindi the national language but was compelled to tone down the objective in its initial draft education policy. In the draft policy, the government has proposed mandatory teaching of Hindi alongside English and the concerned regional language in non-Hindi speaking states. The government later revised its draft policy to make it non-mandatory. It rekindled the stir against imposition of Hindi in 1937, when the first anti-Hindi-imposition agitation was launched in the Madras Presidency. The very attempt to introduce Hindi in any form has been opposed in non-Hindi speaking states as the south Indian states, West Bengal, Assam and other north eastern states. Even Article 351 stated that Hindi may serve as a medium of expression and to be promoted along with all other Indian languages totalling 22 and later three more added to the list in 2004. It would thus appear that the Eighth Schedule was intended to promote the progressing use of Hindi and for the enrichment and promotion of that language. Besides not having a clear constitutional mandate, the effort to impose Hindi as national language was exposed by the Census 2011, which showed that Hindi is the language of less than 44 per cent Indians and mother tongue of only little over 25 per cent people in India. In the Northeast region, Hindi is compulsorily taught till Class 8 except in Arunachal Pradesh, where the language is a mandatory subject till Class 10. In Tripura, Hindi is not compulsory at all in schools. Reacting to Shah’s announcement, NPF president Dr. Shürhozelie, recalled how the Janata Party government under Morarji Desai, wanted to impose Hindi in non-Hindi speaking states like Nagaland. Shürhozelie, who was then education minister of the UDF government, an ally of the Janata Party, told Morarji that Nagas were not unwilling to learn Hindi but it should be first taught not imposed. The chauvinism in this regard is unmistakable. It means those who can’t speak Hindi are not Indians. Congress leader Jairam Ramesh said imposing Hindi will be counter-productive. Today, it could also mean another way of ‘infiltrating education via Hindi’ and there is no prize for guessing whose agenda it could be.