Creating an India that turns on the idea of 'one'

Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s strong advocacy of ‘one nation, one language’ resurrects the old and contentious call for making Hindi the national language at a significant juncture.

The BJP is riding the high of popular support on its actions in Kashmir, legitimised by citing the idea of ‘one nation, one constitution’.

Not surprisingly, the home minister deemed the timing right to intervene in another sensitive and contested idea – India’s thorny national language question.

Shah’s spoke of Hindi as the one unifying language and also of fulfilling the dreams of Gandhi and Patel, who, he said, had wanted one language for the entire nation.

But his ideas are far removed from the nationalistic project of gathering together different identities under a single rubric.

BJP’s idea of nationalism, and the Modi-Shah regime’s interpretation of it, is characterised by the need to strip down India to a single, easily understood entity that belies its pluralistic impulses.

In the process of creating a singular identity for India that turns on the idea of ‘one’, the BJP has not flinched from undermining its plural religious and cultural heritage. And now, it is marching on to the next important component of this project.

This is where Hindi comes into the equation.

This is not something that the BJP has just begun doing. By now there have been a more than a few instances in this regime’s tenure of attempts to promote Hindi as a national language.

The latest attempt was a suggestion in the New Education Policy to make Hindi compulsory until Class 8.The idea was quickly abandoned after protests from the South. This time too, Shah’s statements have provoked a strong reaction from political leaders in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.

Shah and Modi are up against something fundamental to the identity of people in many non-Hindi speaking states.

Although the Constituent Assembly adopted Hindi as India’s official language along with English for a period of 15 years, the language question was never really resolved.

Jawaharlal Nehru gave his word to Parliament in 1959 that English would continue, along with Hindi, as long as the non-Hindi speaking people were not ready to give up the former.

The anti-Hindi agitation of 1965 in Tamil Nadu forced a kind of status quo on the question.

There seem to be multiple springs feeding the BJP’s desire to change the prevailing equation.

Some are ideologically grounded in Hindutva, while others in more pragmatic considerations perhaps.

The BJP is unable to penetrate much of South India, with Karnataka being the sole exception. A wider use of Hindi would prepare the Southern states for its dominance in the future