Rising apprehension in the southern states of India — especially in Tamil Nadu — that Hindi, the dominant language of the BIMARU (Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh) states, is overtly and covertly being imposed as the national language, is justified.  The mandate of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 is that all in-school children countrywide should learn three languages viz, their mother tongue, another Indian language and a foreign language, implicitly bestowing the status of an alien language upon English/Inglish, officially accepted in 1965 as India’s language of business, judiciary and inter-states language of communication. 

In a well-argued op-ed page essay in Times of India (21/4) Anbil Poyyamozhi, Tamil Nadu’s minister for school education, contended that the marginalisation of English is “no small matter” for children in the southern states. According to Poyyamozhi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah has admitted that 70 percent of the Central government’s “cabinet documents are in Hindi”. Moreover despite being well-acquainted with Inglish, Prime Minister Modi and Amit Shah insist on addressing bewildered masses and audiences in peninsular India in Hindi. They also speak only in Hindi when addressing anchors of Inglish language television channels. This insistence of the BJP leadership has influenced lapdog English language television news channels to the extent that some of them are indistinguishable from Hindi news channels.

Therefore, it’s quite plain that given the commitment (“one nation one language”) of the RSS, the mentor cultural organization of  the BJP/NDA government at the Centre, the latter is hell-bent on imposing Hindi as the national language, simultaneously sidelining Inglish which is the associate national language. What other explanation can there be for renaming the recently recast Indian Evidence Act, 1872 as Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam; Indian Penal Code 1860 as Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and the Criminal Procedure Code as Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita? Consequently we have a situation in which learned counsel addressing courts will cite legislation written in Inglish, argue their cases in Inglish but cite these new Acts with jaw-breaking titles. Only in India!

An infirmity of post-independent India’s limping national development effort is failure to apply closure to issues. To all intents and purposes, the issue of Hindi becoming the sole official language was closed in 1965, when Inglish was accorded the status of associate national language. Rather than wasting time and energy on the done and dusted three-language formula, the BJP/ NDA government would do better to focus its attention on graver problems — education, health, skilling, housing, nutrition, and safeguarding the world’s largest child and youth population against the imminent ravages of climate change. Continuous harping upon issues of peripheral import is likely to blot the three-term record of the BJP/NDA government.