Sushma-Tharoor Parliament spar: Shame BJP thinks Hindi represents every Indian
On Wednesday, Union external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj and Congress MP Shashi Tharoor had a spirited exchange in the Lok Sabha, on the issue of making Hindi an official language at the UN.
Swaraj, responding to a question by her own party’s MPs Laxman Giluwa and Rama Devi, said India was making efforts to get Hindi that recognition, and had expense been the only criterion, the government “would have been willing to spend Rs 400 crore for the tag”.
However, said Swaraj, the hurdle lay in securing the support of 129 countries and convincing them to bear the expenses of the move, which is what the UN rules inconveniently demanded, and the government was actively trying to achieve that.
Tharoor – who has served in the UN for decades, including as the Under-Secretary General for Communications and Public Information, and had finished second in the 2006 selection for UN Secretary-General – questioned the need for the move, pointing out that Hindi was not the national language of India, but only an official language.
He also questioned how Hindi being recognised at the UN would help a non-Hindi speaking Indian Prime Minister or foreign minister. Swaraj responded by calling Tharoor “ignorant” and saying Hindi was spoken outside India too. She later posted a video of her speaking fluent Kannada.
While the label for Hindi at the UN is not likely to come any time soon, the very fact that discussion was initiated in Parliament on this, further bolstered by the foreign minister’s aggressive response to Tharoor, has once more thrown up the question – what makes the BJP government and its spokespersons think Hindi represents every Indian?
What gives Swaraj the confidence to assume that non-Hindi taxpayers want their money – Rs 400 crore, no less – spent on securing the UN tag for Hindi, when, say, Tamil too is widely spoken outside India?
How many Indians actually speak Hindi
According to the Census 2001 figures, about 45 per cent of Indians speak or know Hindi. However, just 25 per cent have declared Hindi as their mother tongue. The rest speak variants such as Bhojpuri, Haryanvi, Garhwali and Marwari.
According to a report, 20 of the 29 states in the country do not speak Hindi as their natural language. The imposition of Hindi has, in fact, been actively opposed in a lot of states, most notably in Tamil Nadu.
Constitutionally, India has no national language, and Hindi and English are recognised as official languages. Apart from this, 21 more tongues enjoy the status of official languages.
Why does the central government of India, which is not the government of only those nine Hindi-speaking states, not show the same political passion in promoting the other 21 languages?
The myth of ‘national language’
The desire to impose Hindi on the country is neither new, nor half-hearted.
After the Modi government came to power in 2014, there have been several attempts at an increased use of the language, including putting up road signages in Tamil Nadu and the names of metro stations in Bangalore in Hindi.
A controversial move to use only Hindi as the Centre’s official language on social media was later retracted, and recommendations made by a Committee of Parliament on Official Language included instructing legislators from the Hindi-speaking belt to communicate only in Hindi, making Hindi compulsory in CBSE and Kendriya Vidyalaya schools, and allowing exams and interviews to be conducted in Hindi even in non-Hindi-speaking states.
All the above moves faced massive backlash, at a time when the BJP is trying to make inroads into southern states, especially Karnataka, which is due for polls in 2018, and Kerala, which it is trying to paint as a Left-Muslim-dominated dystopia.
So what motivates the BJP to so assiduously work for a cause that has few visible gains and very real potential for damage?
The answer is simple – the BJP, after all, is the child of the RSS, and cannot think too differently from the agenda of its North Indian, Hindu upper caste-dominated ideological fountainhead.
Hindi as the national language is part of the RSS’s fanciful idea of a Hindu rashtra – one nation, one language, one religion. Of course, the idea negates everything that makes India what it is – an amalgamation of varied religious, caste, community and linguistic identities.
The ruling party at times tends to forget that the RSS is a socio-religious body, the BJP the major constituent of a democratically elected government, voted to power by speakers of many tongues, belonging to many different communities.
The fact that Hindi is spoken in some of the most populous states in India, including Uttar Pradesh, which sends the highest number of elected MPs to Parliament (80), gives the demand to promote Hindi more volume than the ground support it actually enjoys.
Anti-Hindi is not equal to anti-India
The RSS’s narrow worldview has historically been unable to accept, let alone respect, differences. The us-versus-them binary has become mainstream after the BJP came to power, with dissenters of every kind being labelled anti-nationals and non-Hindi-Hindus as foreigners.
The same approach was at play in Swaraj’s response to Tharoor, when she said: “When it comes to official language… you have lived abroad. We had people who knew India. Hindi is an official language in Fiji, so do not say that it is an official language only in India.”
Without responding to Tharoor’s perfectly valid points of the need for the costly move and how it would benefit non-Hindi-speaking PMs, Swaraj tried to discredit his arguments as those made by an anglicised outsider.
Incidentally, the Hindi spoken in Fiji is called Fiji Baat, and is distinct from that spoken in India.
Attempts to equate Hindi-speaker to Indian and love for Hindi to love for country have been made in the past too.
In June 2017, Union Minister M Venkaiah Naidu had said: “Hindi is our national language and it is impossible for India to progress without Hindi. It is unfortunate that everyone is after English medium, I am against Britishers but not their language. We should learn all language, but by learning English our mindset is also changing, this is wrong, this is against the interest of the nation."
It is unlikely that Naidu does not know Hindi is not the national language of the country. Was this statement a mistake or an attempt to misguide?
Before that, senior BJP leader Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi had tweeted that Hindi along with other “regional languages” was the soul of the country, and “promoting Hindi fostered self-respect and confidence” among Indians.
This, when Indians have immolated themselves to protest the imposition of Hindi.
Dangers of backing narrow, majoritarian idea
The insistence on promoting Hindi and portraying it as India’s “true language” turns every other of the many tongues spoken in this country into second-grade languages. This is very similar to practitioners of every other religion apart from Hindusim being turned into second-grade citizens.
Those backing the BJP on the religion plank often realise they fall foul of it where language or dietary preferences are concerned.
This discussion in Parliament on what is a far-fetched and rather frivolous move is just an attempt to show that the BJP is working to bolster “India’s pride” at the international stage.
Hindi is as much Indian as Tamil, Telugu, Malyalam, Urdu, or any of the languages spoken in India are. While the government is welcome to work for the promotion of Hindi, it should be alongside of, and not at the cost of, the many other tongues that are the pride of India.
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