NEW DELHI: India’s decision to impose Hindi upon the country as its official language has been bitterly opposed and criticised by Indian leaders and the Press. The largely attended Tamil and anti-Hindi conference at Tirchirapalli, in a resolution, recorded its strong protest and opposition to the decision for imposition of Hindi, describing it as “unwise [and] unjust”. Through another resolution, the conference demanded end of the provision in the constitution making Hindi in Devanagri script the official language. It urged use of English as an all-India language to save India from disintegration. The conference warned that the Hindi programme would cause delay, inefficiency and chaos in every office, besides the drain on the public exchequer over the translation work.

Mr C. Rajagopalachari, who inaugurated the conference, said that the decision of the Government was bringing about division of India into 15 parts. Former Defence Minister, V. K. Krishna Menon, told a meeting of the Hindi Training College at Trivandrum that he did not accept Hindi as a full-fledged language because it was only a branch of a language. He said he was not opposed to Hindi as such but to the narrow-mindedness of Hindi supporters. Mr Menon recalled that the country’s constitution had given equivalent national status to 14 languages. A linguistic expert, Dr S. K. Chatterjee, in his address to All-India Bengali Literary Conference at Cuttack, said it would be detrimental to the cause of national integration if Hindi was imposed upon the country to please north India.

Published in Dawn, January 23rd, 2015

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