Cutting off the mother tongue (ढाका ट्रिब्यून से साभार)

While the Indian Union and Pakistan celebrated the transfer of power from London to New Delhi and Karachi respectively (something that goes by the name independence in these parts of the world), a Twitter hashtag made the news. On August 15, #stopHindiImposition was trending. This was a well co-ordinated campaign from citizens who wanted to bring their demands for linguistic equality to be brought into public notice.

Such an act, especially on August 15, was termed by some as being “anti-national.” From when did asking for linguistic equality and fighting against imposition of something become an anti-national act -- unless being patriotic and being for Hindi imposition are one and the same? It is precisely this right to protest uni-lateral impositions, among other things, that were supposed to have been achieved on August 15, 1947, or so we were made to believe.

Freedom also means equality. This means no one should have more or less advantage in any sphere of life because of his or her mother tongue. I will give two sets of examples. There are a million things that a non-Hindi mother tongue person can’t do in the Indian Union, and this becomes especially stark when one goes down the socio-economic ladder.

One can’t write to parliamentary committees in their mother tongue (thus cutting out a majority of the people from the legislative process); can’t expect public sector banks to provide forms, documents, and ATM choices in their mother tongue even in their own states and areas; can’t expect airplane safety announcements to be in the major languages of the origin and destination even when both are in non-Hindi regions (ironically, foreign airlines have announcements in Tamil, Malayalam, Bengali, etc for flights to Indian destinations where these languages dominate).

One can’t expect that their prime minister will go abroad and open a non-Hindi language centre in a foreign country as part of PR and “soft-power” projection; can’t have passports and other documents in their own language (Canada does, Switzerland does in five languages, even neighbouring oppressor-of-minorities, Sri Lanka, mentions both Sinhalese and Tamil); can’t argue in their courts in their mother-tongue, even in non-Hindi states; can’t take competitive exams like IIT, IAS, and a host of other “national” exams in their mother tongue.

One can’t expect, in an age of increasing digitisation of information, that “national” websites will also be in their mother tongue; can’t expect that “national” institutions do essay competitions for children in any other language but Hindi; can’t expect that the income tax website and forms to be intelligible in the mother tongues of the majority of tax-payers; can’t expect signboards in Lok Sabha in their own language (Singapore parliament house, ironically again, has signs in Tamil and three other languages).

One also has to put up with disrespectful things like the reservation chart of trains between Chennai and Coimbatore being in Hindi but not in Tamil; can’t expect that central government and PSU bank employees will be paid cash incentives to learn some Indian language other than Hindi (hence non-Hindi speakers fund the cash-incentive based promotion and learning of Hindi -- clearly a Bengali learning Tamil won’t link anyone in any way that “matters” or results in “national integration!”); can’t expect their own mother-tongue signage in trains and metros in areas where they are linguistic minorities. Hindi signs exist everywhere in Bengaluru’s Namma Metro, a city where Hindi doesn’t figure in the three most spoken languages.

One can’t expect central government schemes and missiles to have names that mean nothing in Hindi but are meaningful in other Indian languages (while the reverse seems to be the rule); can’t expect that CISF-CRPF-RPF-Army-BSF will speak and understand the language of non-Hindi locals (but you can’t find a government-paid Khaki in UP who doesn’t understand Hindi); can’t expect government adverts about cleaning India, greening India, making India, and whatnot in non-Hindi languages to be in newspapers and billboards of Hindi regions (while the reverse is true).

One can’t expect that their population proportion will at least hold somewhat constant, if not grow (no points for guessing whether the population proportion of major non-Hindi language speakers have decreased or increased since 1947 -- and the decrease closely parallels the increase in Hindi speakers); can’t expect the central government to fund World Kannada Conference or Tamil Language Day; can’t expect a Bangla film to have a CBFC certificate in Bangla; can’t expect someone to “break into” their non-Hindi mother tongue in English language TV channels; can’t expect government websites that cater to the poorest (like MNREGA information) or government TV channels that cater to farmers (like Kisan TV) to have anything in their mother tongue (as Mohammed Shafi points out: “Farmers of non-Hindi states have real challenges to overcome. Let’s not include ‘learning Hindi’ and ridicule them.”)

The list goes on and on. When a nation-state treats huge sections of its citizens as second class, do those citizens have the same obligation of loyalty to that system as the first class citizens? Only a twisted and hypocritical supremacist can claim to believe in “diversity” and then unilaterally dictate the “common” interface that needs to be developed.

Who are these “non-Hindis” anyways? They are people with individual populations as large as Canada, Mexico, Italy, and Egypt, depending on which state we are talking about. Five of their languages figure among the top 20 languages, with some of the largest numbers of native speakers.

If you are discriminated against on the basis of your mother tongue, are you independent or free? You are not. Who rules over you then? Well, those who oppose linguistic equality and hence, want to continue the discrimination against your mother tongue, that is, against your mother, you, and your coming generations till your kind gives in to this discrimination as “normal” and considers New Delhi-sponsored promotion of a particular language as being “normal.”

If one learns to speak, think, write, and feel in that imposed language, can sing Bollywood tunes to be included in “national” antaksharis on TV and feel included in informal settings among cosmopolitan friends in Mumbai, Delhi, and, increasingly, Bengaluru, one becomes the kind of citizen the state wants one to be.

This is not accidental. It is by design. This is not some new design either. Macaulay had something similar in mind but he is now dead. His ghost now speaks official Hindi and writes that in Devanagari script. Any imposition works best using the resources of the people on whom the imposition takes place. Curzon knew that then. The powers-that-be know that now. 

Author: Garga Chatterjee

http://www.dhakatribune.com/op-ed/2015/aug/21/cutting-mother-tongue