Cpt. Rishwat
T20I Captain
- Joined
- May 8, 2010
- Runs
- 43,398
Anger over BJP’s promotion of Hindi as India’s national language
Hindi should become India’s official language so the country can shake off the “slave mentality” of relying on English, according to a key lieutenant of Narendra Modi, the prime minister.
Amit Shah, the powerful home affairs minister, said that although each of India’s many languages — 22 of them official, 99 unofficial and thousands of dialects — were valued, the country needed a unified voice. “It is very important to have a language of the whole country, which should become the identity of India globally,” he wrote on Twitter, in Hindi. “Today if one language can do the work of uniting the country then it is the most spoken language, Hindi.”
His comments provoked howls from across the country, particularly from the south, where Hindi is not spoken, and from political opponents of the ruling BJP, who are Hindu nationalists.
Hindi was the mother tongue of 528 million Indians, out of a 1.21 billion population, according to the 2011 census. By comparison only 256,000 spoke English as their first language, making it the 44th most popular tongue. English is the second most widely spoken second language. India’s population is now 1.34 billion.
India has no national language, as declared by the constitution, and both Hindi and English are the designated languages of government. Mr Shah, a former BJP party chief who described Muslim refugees as “termites” before the general election earlier this year, said that only an Indian language could protect core values of Indian culture.
In a reference to the popular hybrid known as “Hinglish”, in which Hindi and English words are used together in the same sentence, Mr Shah said caustically: “If you ask a medium Hindi student to speak for 40 minutes in Hindi, he won’t be able to do so.” He added: “There is so much influence of English on us that we cannot talk in Hindi without its help. We shouldn’t surrender to slave mentality.”
Opponents of the BJP warned against pursuing Indian cultural nationalism. “This is part of the hypernationalism of the BJP. From one nation, one language and one culture, it will eventually culminate in one nation and one religion,” the political analyst Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr said.
This fear of an attempt to impose cultural uniformity on a diverse nation was echoed by the opposition Congress party. “We may have one nation, one tax; one nation, one election, but under no circumstances can we have one nation, one culture; one nation, one language,” Jairam Ramesh, the party leader, said.
Pinarayi Vijayan, chief minister of Kerala in the south, said Mr Shah’s remarks were a “war cry” against other languages.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/...-hindi-as-india-s-national-language-lspxs6lmx
I have often criticised Pakistan for not teaching English widely in the country, yet here we have elected ministers in India criticising the widespread use of English as a language.
Isn't this precisely what gave India an advantage in the global trade arena?