A highly avoidable controversy has been raked up over the most innocuously worded circulars issued by the central government on the use of Hindi in official work. Ideally, these should not have been issued, while those who wanted to use Hindi in official work ought to have done so without creating any fuss. Even the circular regarding the use of Hindi on social media was unnecessary. Use Hindi if you wish, but why advertise it? The reason for such abundant caution was simple. Old and vastly exhausted anti-Hindi zealots would have been denied any chance to replay their old and broken anti-Hindi record had there been no such circulars. People like M Karunanidhi, who are yet to recover from the severe blow the voters had administered them in the recent parliamentary poll, were only too happy to latch on to these circulars to cry wolf. Of course, nobody was imposing Hindi down the throats of the unwilling Indians keen to use other Indian languages, or even English. All that the Modi Government had done was to recycle the old circular and send it across to all department heads in government and public undertakings. Such circulars are routinely issued — and routinely ignored. And, come to think of it, a committee of MPs, including those from the non-Hindi-speaking states, regularly visits various offices across the country to study the progress made in the use of Hindi in everyday official work. In fact, some years ago an all-party delegation of parliamentarians had toured various Indian missions abroad to inquire firsthand the extent to which Hindi was being used by our diplomatic staff. The notable thing is that when it came to using Hindi for junketing at home or abroad, members from the South did not hesitate to join the delegation of MPs. Which further proves our point that the Hindi issue is periodically whipped up by the Tamilian politicians when they have exhausted all else to find relevance. Karunanidhi should rest assured that there is no move to impose Hindi on an unwilling people anywhere in the country. No, not even in the north. It is remarkable that the very people who preach the benefits of using Hindi in official work unfailingly send their own children to English medium educational institutions. Mulayam Singh Yadav, for example, is a great votary of Hindi, having embraced the language as a campaign issue from his late mentor, Ram Manohar Lohia. But he sent his son and now Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Akhilesh Yadav, to a little known Australian university and his grandchildren certainly do not go to a Hindi ‘paathshaala.’ To get back to the ersatz controversy over the Hindi circulars, neither any rights of the non-Hindi speaking people are encroached upon nor anyone is being made to compulsorily use that language in official work.
The fact is that, over the years, Hindi has gained acceptability even in the South, including Tamil Nadu, thanks to the universal popularity of the Hindi cinema. Even Tamilians realise that the Centre has no wish to enforce the use of Hindi, given that the use of English has grown enormously even in the Hindi heartland with more and more people realising that English is the medium of the aspirational classes. Yes, suspicions about the compulsory use of Hindi gain some traction due to the past association of the language with the Sangh Parivar. But these fears are wholly misplaced. For even the Sangh Parivar is not what it was in the ‘60s, when Tamil Nadu had seen violent protests against the move by the then Congress Government in New Delhi, which had issued an ill-considered circular imposing Hindi as the sole link language. Since then, all sides have gained maturity and their ardour for the ‘matrubhasha’ has dimmed so much that they wish to be proficient in the use of English. Therefore, nip this controversy over the Hindi circulars in the bud. Karunanidhi should search for some issue to regain relevance.
