How India Lost A Golden Opportunity To Have A National Language

The recent comment by India's Union Home Minister has sparked an interesting debate. In his speech given in Hindi to a group of students of an institute in Noida, he said in 'English bolne se gyan nahi hota (one doesn't gain knowledge just by speaking in English). One should speak English when needed'. He further added "I am not talking about only Hindi but all Indian languages. Khali angrez nahin bano. Pehle Bharatiya bano. (Don't become an Englishman. Be an Indian first)". Leaving the political battle and media outcry that followed this comment, I was intrigued as to why he was crying over spilt milk.

Due to India's large population, Hindi, being the language spoken by the majority, has become the fourth most spoken language in the world. There are 2 more Indian languages that have made the cut to the top 10 - Bengali and Punjabi. However English, placed third, is widely used and accepted all over the world. India is no exception to this, deriving its legacy from its colonial rule when English was introduced.

Today English is the medium of impacting education in most institutions especially higher education. There are several schools which maintain a local Indian language as the preferred language of teaching. It definitely helps in getting a firm grip over one's mother tongue. However, due to myriad languages in all states in India and the lack of qualified translators, these students although fluent in the local language face a huge barrier after class XII examinations. Most national competitive exams give an option to choose either English or Hindi to write the written test. Even interviews are limited to these two languages. Hence, students who have studied in state language schools (quite a few of my friends fall in this category) find it a struggle at this stage. If they do manage to get past this hurdle (since English is also taught as a second language in these schools), the situation become acute when they join these institutes.

There is a scramble to learn English from the start itself since most study materials are only published in English. I seriously doubt if any attempt has been made to make quality education available in any other language in our country. The consequence of this gets carried to the next level. I have seen that technically brilliant students who do not have English education background have inferiority complex over fluent English speaking batchmates or colleagues, albeit having far better knowledge, grades, skills and experience.

I am deeply concerned about the rest of the not so brilliant non-English education background students. For them there is a wide gap from the start itself. The job market is not too kind to them either although things appear to have improved since I started my career about 10 years ago. I have come come across interview panels where interviewers have shrugged when a candidate answered questions in broken or incorrect English. Despite having fairly decent grades in comparison to some other candidates, they were not selected and somewhere I have a suspicion that their communication skills largely contributed to this. Quite unfortunate but this is the striking reality.

If we take a look at some countries who thrive with their native language, one resonating factor remains - uniformity of language spoken throughout. Be it China, France, Japan or Italy, the way of speaking differs a bit from one region to another, but it is essentially Chinese, French, Japanese or Italian. We can consider Hindi as our national language but as we all know it is not spoken all over our vast country. Languages spoken are as fragmented as our states. And it is not these languages have sprung up just now - most of them are ancient languages. The 2 languages in our ancient culture are Sanskrit and Tamil, which are widely believed to have given birth to all other languages. Today Sanskrit, though used in rituals and offerings, is dying. Tamil fortunately is still at the forefront outside India as well.

We did have more than one opportunity to overthrow our colonial hangover when we were free but the golden opportunity was frittered by a weak and short-sighted Government. Firstly, the seed sown by our first Prime Minister's independence 'Tryst With Destiny' speech speaks volumes why Hindi was never at the forefront nationally. Secondly, Article 343 of the Constitution contained a provision to phase out English at the end of 15 years but the Central Government was only able to implement it partially making Hindi its official language in 1965. The Hon'ble High Court of Gujarat, while referring to Constitutional Assembly discussion behind framing Article 343, has held as recently as 2010 that "Normally, in India, majority of the people have accepted Hindi as a national language and many people speak Hindi and write in Devanagari script but there is nothing on the record to suggest that any provision has been made or order issued declaring Hindi as a national language of the country" (Sureshbhai B. Kacchadia v. Union of India). This has virtually ended all debate regarding considering Hindi as our national language and the Home Minister's comments today are nothing but crying over spilt milk.

I am totally in favour of having a national language uniform throughout India. However, the progress in science, economy, business and education that we as a nation have made over the last 68 odd years through the English language medium will be completely lost until a proper system is put in place to effectively uproot English from all communication - official, working, personal, general whatsover (including my blog here!!). This is a herculean task and it is unlikely that any Government in India will have the endeavour to pursue it. Hence the Home Minister's words, however noble or outrageous, are not implementable and should not even be given a second thought!