By: Viswa Nathan
As if India weren’t short of controversies, the country’s home minister, Amit Shah, reignited one recently, saying he wants Indians of different mother tongues to communicate in Hindi, not in English, as they do now. Immediately, challenges began thundering across the country. In the eastern state of West Bengal, where Bengali is the mother tongue, the ruling Trinamool Congress said any effort to impose Hindi on states where it is not their language would be resisted. In the Tamil-speaking southern state of Tamil Nadu, Chief Minister MK Stalin said Shah’s proposal would wreck India’s integrity as it went against the country’s cherished pluralism. Abhishek Singhvi, spokesperson of the Congress Party that ruled India through most of its independence years, and a strong Hindi supporter, also denounced imposing Hindi on the vast section of the non-Hindi speaking population. For those unfamiliar with the complexities of the Indian subcontinent and the Indian union as a nation, Hindi is just one of 122 languages and 270 dialects. Twenty-three languages including English and Hindi, are recognized as the union’s official languages. Hindi developed as the everyday speech of the Aryan people who settled on the Indus Valley, who came to be called Hindus, eventually becoming the language of the northern regions of the subcontinent… The text above is just an excerpt from this subscriber-only story.To read the whole thing and get full access to Asia Sentinel's reporting and archives, subscribe now for US$10/month or US$100/year.
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