Hindi Push Can Lead To Backlash

This article was last updated on April 16, 2022

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Since the elections and the appointment of the new Modi government, the center has been concentrating and putting extra emphasis on making Hindi the only official language of India as well as the preferred language of the capital’s urbane and golf-playing bureaucrats.

The Hindi push by the government is not taken lightly in states where Hindi  is not spoken fluently by the people of that state. The Tamil Nadu chief minister, J Jayalalitha and two of BJP’s allies strongly opposed this movement by the government while a Union minister said a “wrong propaganda” was being made on the issue.  At the national level, CPM leader Brinda Karat also opposed any move to impose Hindi while in Odisha Assembly a member’s attempt to put a question in Hindi was disallowed by the chair. Chidambaram on the other hand slammed the decision by stating that ‘there will be a backlash in non-Hindi speaking states specially Tamil Nadu.’

Sending a letter to the Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Jayalalithaa described that the home ministry’s proposal as “against the letter and spirit” of the Official Languages Act, 1963, and said the “highly sensitive issue” has caused “disquiet” to the people of Tamil Nadu “who are very proud of and passionate about their linguistic heritage”. PMK chief Ramadoss described the diktat as “an unacceptable imposition of Hindi”, whereas leader V Gopalsamy, popularly known as Vaiko warned today, “Don’t wake a sleeping tiger. The imposition of Hindi is a threat to national integrity….Tamil Nadu has shed blood against the imposition of Hindi earlier.”