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India: Govt. faces outrage over imposing Hindi in official communications over social media

June 21, 2014 | By Parmjeet Singh

New Delhi, India (June 21, 2014): Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) led NDA government draw strong criticism over it’s directive to impose Hindi for all “official” communications on social networking sites, such as Twitter and Facebook.

India is a country inhabited by various nationalities, ethnicities, linguistic and cultural identities. But the Indian state through the process of building a nation-state in India, is attempting to eliminate cultural and linguistic differences through assimilation. Hindi language is being imposed with a hidden agenda of forcing homogenisation through education, media and propaganda. Hindi has a shared status of being “contact-language”, along with English, so far communication between states or between the centre and the states is concerned; but it’s being falsely propagated, even in schools, that Hindi was “national-language” of India.

Making Hindi mandatory in official communications over social media is yet another attempt to impose Hindi over people of diverse linguistic backgrounds.

Major political parities of non-Hindi speaking states of southern parts of the peninsula opposed the government’s move.

DMK leader MK Stalin had on Thursday (June 19) taunted the Government of India by asking it whether it fit into Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s mantra of better governance.

“Hindi is being imposed on 55% of non-Hindi speaking government servants & general public. Is this max governance, min government?” he asked in a tweet.

Besides major political parties in south India, the Left and even NDA allies in Tamil Nadu have also objected to the May 27 circular.

On Friday, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa wrote to Narendra Modi saying the circular should be amended as it was against the letter and spirit of the Official Languages Act of 1963, which has both English and Hindi as official languages.

“The circular however makes the use of Hindi mandatory and English optional,” Jayalalithaa said in her letter to Modi. Congress leader and former finance minister P Chidambaram on Friday (June 20) urged the government to be “well-advised” to proceed with caution as “imposition of Hindi will lead to backlash in certain states”.

After facing strong opposition on the issue the Narendra Modi government has been on back foot. The government has ought to “clarify” that its controversial directive making the use of Hindi mandatory for officials on social networking websites was actually an idea of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) regime and would in any case now only apply to Hindi speaking states, seeking to draw a line under criticism that it was trying to impose the language on the entire country and that it had misplaced priorities.

On Friday, the home ministry, which was in the line of fire from friends and foes alike for the past two days over its May 27 circular asking government officials to tweet in Hindi or at least give priority to the language in their social media messages, said its communication, a day after the government was sworn in on May 26, only sought to reiterate a March 10 directive of UPA.

“It is clarified that these instructions of the Department of Official Languages dated March 10 do not seek to impose communication in Hindi on states which are not Hindi speaking,” a home ministry statement said.

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Related Topics: BJP, India, Indian State

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