Tamil Nadu has cause to be wary, for BJP-RSS tends to convert Indianisation to Hindi-isation, and again, Hindi-isation to Hindu-isation, as past instances show
A seemingly innocent question being asked by several people, curiously even from South India, is why the Tamil Nadu government headed by Chief Minister MK Stalin should be so trenchant and refuse to implement the three-language policy of the National Education Policy (NEP) when, apparently, there is no insistence that the third language should be Hindi.
Some say it is the expression of an obtuse regional pride that fails to see the larger national picture and insists on Tamil Nadu being different from the rest of the country at any cost.
Some others believe it is a political game of whipping up Tamil sentiment, aimed at making gains in the upcoming legislative elections of 2026. Still some others feel it is part of a pattern of knee-jerk opposition to the Centre that has come to define DMK politics of late.
Watch | How TN’s resistance to Hindi imposition has shaped political landscape for a century
NEP’s unspoken agenda
Be that as it may, a closer look will reveal that the suspicion expressed by Stalin and other members of his government — that an unspoken agenda of the NEP is the imposition of Hindi — is neither idle nor without basis.
On the contrary, that their fears are well justified will be clear if one were to undertake even a cursory scrutiny of the BJP's policies in the last 11 years of its rule.
Nothing that the BJP does is as it appears to be; every programme, every policy introduced by it has hidden stakes that have much less to do with their avowed national interests than with the ideological, sectarian and even business interests of the Hindutva Armageddon and its sundry associates.
Hindi, Hindi everywhere
The case with Hindi is no different. It did not start with the NEP, nor will it end with it.
In reality, the imposition of Hindi has become the rule of the day in every conceivable area of governance, through sustained efforts at renaming and rebranding policies, schemes, projects, places and so on.
A summary list of such renaming will serve to prove the point: Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (UPA’s Basic Savings Bank Deposit Account), Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao Yojana (National Girl Child Day programme); Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana (Rajiv Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojana), Mission Indradhanush (Universal Immunisation Programme), Pratyaksh Hanstantrit Labh - PAHAL (Direct Benefits Transfer for LPG), to name a few.
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Criminal laws
Another particularly disturbing case was the renaming of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) to Bharatiya Nyaya Samhita (knowledgeable Sanskritists will probably marvel at the remarkable dim-wittedness that is capable of reducing an entire system of knowledge, and extensive school of philosophy, which includes logic, epistemology and jurisprudence, to a singular penal code), the Criminal Procedure Code to Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Samhita, and the Indian Evidence Act to Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam.
Even as these names are in contravention of Article 348 of the Constitution, which states that the authoritative texts of all Acts passed by Parliament or state legislatures shall be in the English language, they are also unfamiliar and unpronounceable to the majority of the country’s citizens.
(At best, only 43.63 per cent of Indians speak Hindi according to Census 2011; a more nuanced data may bring this figure much lower down, given that several local languages of the Hindi belt do not even figure in the Census and many communities have been left with no choice but to give Hindi as their mother tongue.)
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More importantly, the majority of the country’s legal practitioners, including judges who practice law in English and their local languages also find these changes hard to mouth. This led the Madras Bar Association to pass a resolution for the English names to be retained and several other courts to effectively continue with the old names, making these changes impractical and even ludicrous.
Indianisation or Hindi-isation?
Apart from the woeful poverty of ideas and imagination that prevents the Hindutva advocates from coming up with any viable policy or scheme of their own and compels them to adopt and relabel earlier ones, even as they consistently badmouth every previous government starting with Nehru’s, there is a distinct strategy at work in these efforts.
That is the so-called project of Indianisation, which in effect boils down to a strident Hindi-isation, the full political and cultural implications of which will become evident only when another aspect of the project is also factored into consideration.
Under the guise of decolonisation, several place names have been changed by BJP governments, the most notable of which are Ahmedabad to Karnavati, Allahabad to Prayagraj, Faizabad to Ayodhya, Aurangabad to Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar and Osmanabad to Dharashiv. Manifestly evident in these changes is the erasure of everything that smacks of Islam and Mughal rule.
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Hindi-isation thus becomes Hinduisation. That wherever possible the name 'India' is also being replaced with ‘Bharat’ only accentuates the real directions of the project.
Demeaning Kerala
The experience of Kerala is a case in point in the unilateral project of Hindi-isation. Kerala, which has had thriving public health centres run on state funds from the 1950s, when such a thing was largely unheard of in the rest of the country, was denied Central grants for its health sector because it refused to paint its Primary Health Centres saffron and rename them with the new found Hindi name, Ayushman Arogya Mandirs, replacing the older Malayalam name, Prathamika Arogya Kendras, a simple phrase intelligible to any Keralite.
The same was the case with the state government’s Life Mission project, which provided houses to underprivileged sections, with the Centre refusing to provide assistance for the project unless it was renamed Pradhan Mantri Aavas Yojana.
The singular irony of the Centre’s demand was that its share in the Rs 4 lakh cost of each house was a mere Rs 72,000 (18 per cent) while the state’s share was Rs 3.68 lakh (82 per cent).
Spirit of federalism
It is obvious that there is a much larger game plan at work here which Stalin, once responding to the renaming of the penal code, characterised as “reeking of linguistic imperialism” and as an attempt at “recolonisation in the name of decolonisation”.
Watch | Why does South, except TN, have no problem with Hindi?
It is here that one needs to realise that Tamil Nadu’s opposition to Hindi goes to the heart of federalism, in terms of both its concept and its practice.
Even at the risk of sounding tedious, the question of what federalism is and how it works needs to be asked insistently because it goes to the root of most problems that the Indian nation faces at this moment of its history.
Federalism and heterogeneity
Politically, federalism is a system of government that divides power between a central authority and regional governments. It allows each level of government to maintain its own identity and make decisions appropriate to its interests and areas of jurisdiction.
In the case of India, the Central government handles areas of national interest while regional governments handle day-to-day administration and areas of regional interest, necessitating a sustained culture of negotiation between the Centre and the states to make and implement policies, thus ensuring a balance between national unity and regional autonomy.
Further, federalism is predicated upon the concept and practice of heterogeneity, of difference, wherein constituents choose to come together for common goals and needs, even while maintaining their independent Identities.
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Heterogeneity vs homogeneity
Federalism is thus not just a political concept; it is a deeply cultural one. It presupposes that different regions have different histories and cultural trajectories that configure the distinct identities of their people, and that they have the autonomy to pursue their independent courses even as they are part of a union.
Cultural and political heterogeneity is the spirit of federalism, even as different regions choose to come together for some common goals.
Homogeneity, on the other hand, is not a choice but an imposition, there is always the language of power and submission implicit in it: the power of the few and the submission of the many.
There is little doubt that this conflict between Tamil Nadu and the Centre is primarily a conflict between the contrary claims of heterogeneity and homogeneity, between a thriving, centuries-old Tamil identity, on the one side, and the ideology of Hindutva, which strives to impose a forced oneness upon a country that is more marked by differences than similarities, on the other.
Language in federal polity
As any linguist would vouch, language is not merely a medium, or a transparent receptacle for depositing ideas and facts which are then communicated to others. Language is culture; it determines the ways of thinking, feeling and experience of a people; it defines their identity.
As Ngugi wa Thiongo, the famous African writer and post-colonial theorist, states eloquently in his Decolonising the Mind: “Language as culture is the collective memory bank of a people’s experience in history. Culture is almost indistinguishable from the language that makes possible its genesis, growth, banking, articulation and indeed its transmission from one generation to the next.”
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He explains how “language as culture” functions in the lives of its speakers. “Language carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world. How people perceive themselves affects how they look at their culture, at their politics and at the social production of wealth, at their entire relationship to nature and to other beings. Language is thus inseparable from ourselves as a community of human beings with a specific form and character, a specific history, a specific relationship to the world... The choice of language and the use of language is central to a people’s definition of themselves in relation to the entire universe.” In this sense, the question of language is no trite matter, it is not merely to do with politics or education.
Delimitation and language
It is a question of historical evolution, of self-determination, of autonomy, and of refusing to surrender a people’s aspirations and future to some who have no respect for those.
Ultimately, it is a question of independence and identity, and forms the basis of a federal culture in which there is respect for differences and the space to express them. In that sense, it is also the basis of a genuine democracy which respects diversity and plurality.
In this light, it is no surprise that Stalin was unambiguous in stating: “The BJP’s audacious bid to supplant our identity with Hindi will be opposed resolutely.” It is also no surprise that Tamil Nadu sees delimitation as an issue integrally related to the language issue because it involves the disempowerment of non-Hindi states that are more developed, better educated, have better life indices and have successfully controlled their population growth.
What TN can do
In these circumstances, one hopes that the political leadership of non-BJP states realise the importance of the matter and throw their weight with Stalin, for the larger goal of protecting the federal, democratic polity of the nation.
One also wishes that Tamil Nadu would introduce a third language in its curriculum, as purely a matter of choice for each individual student, where each student gets to choose whether she/he wants to learn another language and what language it should be.
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It would be a brilliant move if the State then proceeds to offer an inclusive bouquet of language courses that include foreign languages such as French, Spanish, Italian, German and other Indian languages. This should, of course, include Hindi not only because it is a beautiful language with a rich literature but also because the sins of its asinine advocates should not be allowed to tarnish its value as a language.
Not only will it be a telling statement for democratic and cosmopolitan federalism but also a helping hand for the hordes of meritorious Tamil students who aspire for admission to the best higher education institutions of the world. Even better will it be if Urdu and Arabic were also offered as full choices, in a gesture of secular inclusivity that sees the world as its oyster.(The Federal seeks to present views and opinions from all sides of the spectrum. The information, ideas or opinions in the article are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Federal.)
