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BJP’s Hindi Imposition Part of RSS Agenda of One Nation One Language

Neelambaran A.

‘Hindi should be accepted as an alternative to English and not local languages. People of different states should communicate with each other in Hindi and not English,’ said Union home minister Amit Shah in the 37th meeting of the Parliamentary Official Language Committee.

‘There’s no compelling situation to learn a language and prove that one is an Indian,’ said K Annamalai, a former IPS officer and president of Tamil Nadu state unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

As expected, leaders across the country voiced their opposition, led by the chief ministers of Tamil Nadu and Kerala. The leaders from the northeastern states also joined the chorus against the attempts to impose Hindi with statements against the comments of the Union home minister.

After several decades of anti-Hindi imposition struggle, the state of Tamil Nadu remains at the forefront of the struggle against language imposition and to protect the regional languages.

The BJP-led government, since it assumed power in 2014, has continuously spoken about a single language despite the diversity prevailing in the country for several centuries.

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) has been battling to promote Sanskrit and Hindi. In contrast, it has made its intentions clear on capturing the civil society through cultural intervention, with language imposition being their preferred choice.

Opposition from South

The first words of opposition came from the southern states, including the allies and BJP leaders themselves. Even the Tamil Nadu state unit president of the BJP claimed that Tamil could qualify as the link language, much to the embarrassment of the Union minister.

The arch-rivals in the state, the ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), are on the same page in opposing Shah’s statement.

MK Stalin, the chief minister, condemned the attempts to make Hindi the official language. The AIADMK coordinator and former CM O Panneer Selvam (OPS) batted for the two language policy followed by the state and quoted former chief minister CN Annadurai.

In a statement tweeted by OPS, he said that the AIADMK stands firm on the two language policy and cannot accept the imposition of Hindi.

Stalin criticised the efforts of the BJP-led government to push through Hindi as the medium of communication with non-Hindi speaking states.

He also assured that his party would continue to fight for the states’ rights and choice of language.

DMK MP Kanimozhi Karunanidhi said that imposing Hindi will not unify the country but only pose a threat to the country’s unity.

Kerala CM, Pinarayi Vijayan, came down hard on the Union government during his address in the seminar on ‘Centre-State Relationship’ organised as part of the 23rd party congress of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI(M)].

“The BJP and RSS do not want to accept the diverse culture of the nation and want to destroy it, which cannot be accepted,” he said.

Leaders from Karnataka and Telugu-speaking states have also opposed the intention to make Hindi the communication language between the Union and states.

AR Rahman’s tweet creates storm

Oscar-winning musician AR Rahman tweeted an image of a woman clad in a white saree named ‘Tamizhnagu’. The tweet was made a day after Shah’s comments.

When questioned by the media about Hindi being proposed by Shah as the link language replacing the local languages, Rahman said, “Why should Hindi be the link language? It should be Tamil.”

The right-wing forces soon attacked the musician for denigrating ‘Tamil Thai‘ (Goddess Tamil) by portraying her as ‘dark skinned’ and his reported comments against imposing Hindi. Political parties, including the radical Naam Tamilar Katchi (NTK), extended support to Rahman on the issue. The NTK statement said that Rahman had echoed the opinion of all the Tamils.

Concerns from Northeast India

The northeastern states are another region where Hindi is not used. Different political parties and civil society organisations have raised concerns against the proposal to make Hindi the communication language.

The Union government has made Hindi the compulsory language in the states’ schools, with Arunachal Pradesh and Tripura being the exception.

Appointment of Hindi teachers has also taken place, much to the dismay of the lovers of regional languages. Several bodies, including the Northeast Students’ Union, have opposed the regressive measure and wanted students to be taught in their local language.

“This is unacceptable and contradicts the New Education Policy introduced by the BJP-led government, which seeks to support primary education in the mother tongue,” said Congress leader and leader of the Opposition Debabrata Saikia, the Deccan Chronicle reported.

Attack on cultural diversity

The CPI(M) in Tamil Nadu announced a statewide protest on April 19 and demanded that all languages included in schedule 8 be used as the communication language.

The party has accused the Union government of pedalling the fundamentalistic policies of the RSS on language and culture.

“The RSS and the Jana Sangh had always opposed the constitution, national anthem and flag and diverse culture of the Union,” the statement said.

The push to impose ‘One Nation, One Language’ has long been a priority of the RSS and the BJP, which was pushed harder during Shah’s ‘Hindi Diwas’ speech in 2019.

Aadhavan Dheetchanya, general secretary of the Tamil Nadu Progressive Writers and Artists Association (TNPWAA), said, “The BJP government has been popularising Hindi and Sanskrit by naming schemes and programmes in these languages. The RSS and BJP disagree with the rich cultural and linguistic diversity prevailing and want a unitary culture.”

Similar efforts were made during the previous regime of the Congress, which were held back due to strong opposition and protests.

“The ideology of RSS is killing other cultures and moving towards a brahminical culture by focussing it on being the nation’s culture. Hindi imposition is one such step, but BJP and RSS want to popularise Sanskrit by spending and allocating more funds for its development than the funds allocated to all other languages,” Aadhavan said.

Making one language a communication language is considered a step towards centralisation and degrading other dialects.

“Former BJP leader LK Advani has spoken about capturing the civil society through different modalities. Imposing a language and invading other dialects is one such step in achieving this,” Aadhavan said.

(Courtesy: Newsclick.)

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Why Assam Is Up in Arms Against Amit Shah’s Proposal to Make Hindi Compulsory Till Class 10

Rokibuz Zaman

There will be a “protest” against Hindi imposition if the Centre presses forward with its proposal to make Hindi compulsory till Class 10 in Assam, warned All Assam Students’ Union president Dipanka Kumar Nath.

He was reacting to statements made by Union Home Minister Amit Shah, who had presided over the Parliamentary Official Language Committee on April 7. Shah had said that Hindi, and not English, should be the link language between different linguistic communities.

He added that Hindi should be made compulsory till Class 10 in North Eastern states and that nine tribal communities in these states had already switched to the Devanagari script.

In Assam, many were up in arms. Samujjal Bhattacharya, advisor to the All Assam Students’ Union, tweeted that the proposal to make Hindi compulsory till Class 10 “threatens the future” of “indigenous languages” in the region.

Nath claimed that the proposal was driven by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s “political interest”. The party, he said, was trying to “impress” the Hindi belt of the northern states.

Assam’s BJP government is now in a bind. The party had come to power chanting the slogan of Assamese subnationalism – “jati, mati, bheti” (community, land, hearth).

But Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, who is believed to be close to the central leadership, is now trying to strike an uneasy balance. He said there was no central order yet to make Hindi compulsory till Class 10.

“Amit Shah said that children must know Hindi, and we also want them to know Hindi and English, but he has not said that one must give up learning Assamese to learn Hindi,” Sarma reasoned.

Sarma’s solution to the problem was to introduce a four-language instead of three-language formula advocated by the National Education Policy. Under the national policy, states, regions and individual students could decide which three languages they learnt, but at least two of these had to be “native to India”.

According to Sarma, under the four-language policy, a student would learn Assamese, English, a tribal language and Hindi in the Brahmaputra Valley. In the Barak Valley region of Assam, students would learn Bengali instead of Assamese. The Assam Sahitya Sabha and other tribal literary bodies were already on board with the four-language policy, Sarma claimed.

While Sarma tried to play it down, Shah’s announcement has cut to the heart of identity politics in Assam and other North Eastern states.

Language and identity

As Nath himself acknowledged, Hindi is already compulsory in Assam government schools till Class 8, and students could choose to take Hindi up to Class 10.

“A Class 10 student can choose Hindi from around 30 elective subjects, including Assamese, history, geography, advanced maths, among others,” said an Assam education department official.

So the present proposal does not drastically change the system in reality. It does, however, have deep political resonances in Assam, where language has been central to a regional identity.

“Why should we accept the imposition of others’ mother tongue?” demanded Nath.

Assertions of Assamese cultural identity were made through language in the colonial era, with the Asam Sahitya Sabha established in 1917. In the 1950s and ’60s, Assamese was pitted against Bengali, which had been the official language of colonial Assam. When the government tried to make Assamese the official language in 1960, it led to agitations in the largely Bengali-speaking Barak Valley, where 11 people were killed.

For decades, there has been a pervasive fear that Assamese speakers will be a linguistic minority in the state. Those who identify as indigenous Assamese are anxious that their language and culture are threatened by migrants – from former East Bengal (now Bangladesh) and from Hindi-speaking states. These anxieties about language fed into the Assam Movement of the 1980s, which eventually gave way to an armed struggle for secession.

Successive censuses fuelled these anxieties. People who report Assamese as their mother tongue are already below 50%. The percentage of Assamese speakers also fell marginally from 48.80% in 2001 to 48.38% in 2011. During the same period, the number of Hindi speakers rose from 5.89% in 2001 to 6.73% in 2011.

Fears of the Assamese language being marginalised were exacerbated with the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019, which facilitates citizenship for undocumented, non-Muslim migrants from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Many in Assam felt it would open the door to a tide of migration from neighbouring Bangladesh.

With Shah’s statement, anxieties about language have emerged again. “Making Hindi compulsory would create apprehension in the minds of people,”Assam Sahitya Sabha president and former director general of police Kuladhar Saikia told Scroll.in. “The Assam Sahitya Sabha has been asking for development and spread of Assamese language as well as the language of other ethnic groups.”

Back in 2019, as anti-CAA protests engulfed Assam, the state government had proposed the four-language formula to address anxieties about language. But this was met with opposition from the Bodo Sahitya Sabha.

A Bodo Sahitya Sabha member told Scroll.in that if the four-language formula was implemented, members of the Bodo community would have to read Assamese, which would lead to a language problem. The Bodo language has now switched to the Devanagari script. Having to learn both Bodo and Assamese, that too in different scripts, would be confusing for children, he felt.

According to Sarma, the implementation of the four-language policy has been held up by objections from the Bodo Sahitya Sabha.

Other tongues

Not just Assam, but other states have also protested against the move to make Hindi compulsory till Class 10. The Mizoram government said it had not yet given the nod to the proposal and Nagaland pointed out the Centre had not yet issued formal instructions to implement it.

In a letter addressed to Shah, the North East Students’ Organisation, a conglomeration of the eight leading students’ bodies representing seven states of the North Eastern region, said: “The imposition of Hindi as a compulsory subject in the NER [North Eastern region] will be detrimental not only for the propagation and dissemination of the indigenous languages but also to students who will be compelled to add another compulsory subject to their already vast syllabus.”

In a linguistically diverse region like the North East, the language question is never simple. While state governments push back against Hindi, smaller ethnic groups within the states have often resisted the imposition of the state language as the primary language.

Despite the Assam Sahitya Sabha’s demand that other languages be developed, Manoranjan Pegu, a researcher who belongs to the Mising community, was not convinced. “I am against the Hindi imposition. But let’s not somehow think the Assam sahitya sabha worries about other local languages,” he tweeted.

Thongkolal Haokip, who teaches at Jawaharlal Nehru University and is originally from Manipur, tweeted: “Why so much opposition to Hindi in the #NorthEast when most states in the region are imposing their own state language ruthlessly within their state boundary?”

The proposal to impose Hindi has doubled the pressure on smaller communities that fear the extinction of their linguistic identities.

‘Not opposed to Hindi’

Litterateur and former director general of police in Assam Harekrishna Deka said Shah’s statement “smacks of [a] dictatorial temper”.

He elaborated, “Learning Hindi may be encouraged by giving rewards [and without] making it compulsory. Hindi is a rich Indian language and in the long run, learning [it] will help in India. But imposition will be seen as coercive.”

For political scientist and author Udayon Misra, imposing Hindi was a step in a larger cultural agenda. Shah’s statement, he said, was yet another “direct assault by the BJP” on the principles of federalism.

“One is certainly not opposed to learning Hindi,” he said. “But the manner in which this is being done is indicative of a much more comprehensive plan of the BJP-RSS to appropriate the defining markers of local language, tradition and culture and bring them within the parameters of so-called one nation, one language and one culture. This is what is deeply worrying.”

According to Misra, the “long-term agenda” was to iron out the structures and processes of Assam and other North Eastern states, “which stand in sharp contrast to the in-built social inequalities and caste prejudices which mark most of the North Indian regions where the BJP holds sway”.

Vanishing languages

A language expert who has been working with the state government to implement the three-language formula of the National Education Policy, said that if Hindi was really made compulsory in all schools, Assamese and other tribal languages would “disappear” from the Brahmaputra Valley. Similarly, Bengali would “vanish” from the Barak Valley, said the expert, who did not want to be identified.

Under the three-language policy, Hindi is not yet compulsory. “If Hindi is made mandatory, and children use English, they will have to take either Assamese or any tribal language,” he said. “So if the students study the tribal language as a third language, they will not read Assamese or Bengali.”

However, the four-language policy proposed by the Assam government would make more room for linguistic diversity, he felt.

For now, the Assam BJP is trying to defend Hindi being made compulsory. “Hindi is the national language and the Assam BJP wants people to learn it,” Assam BJP chief spokesperson Kamakhya Prasad Tasa. “Apunar bakha apuni a roikhya koribo lagibo [Your own language will have to be protected by you only]. How can learning Hindi be a threat to other languages?”

(Courtesy: Scroll.in.)