Twitter explodes over Shah's 'one nation, one language'

Union Home Minister Amit Shah's pitch for a 'One Nation, One Language' policy on Hindi Divas received a massive backlash from Twitteratis on Saturday with #StopHindiImposition and #StopHindiImperialism topping the trends through the day.

Emotional, stinging and angry, the tweets came thick and fast, questioning the rationale behind such a move. But lawyer Sanjay Hegde's tweet was more of a dire warning about the consequences of playing with the controversial language issue.

Hegde said: “A reading of Constituent Assembly Debates on language, will tell you how divisive an issue it was. Lal Bahadur Shastri learnt it the hard way in 1965. Sri Lanka almost broke up over Sinhala imposition on Tamils. Pakistan broke up over Urdu on Bengalis.”

Widely shared were maps that showed the country's linguistic diversity with multiple colours depicting the geographical areas of influence. The intention was clear: To demolish the purported plan to show Hindi as the only language with a nationwide imprint.

Adding to the avalanche of tweets and retweets, public policy purveyor, Rakshith Ponnathpur drew Shah's attention to what mattered the most for Indians.

His tweet went this way: “Our flag, our anthem, our emblem, our language, our culture, our identity. This is everything for us. We shall resist imposition and imperialism. You can use our money to shove Hindi on us & celebrate a hundred more #HindiDivas. But nothing is going to change!”

The money used to promote Hindi Divas was the bone of contention for many. Here's what Ramachandra M had to say: "The beauty of India is its diversity and numerous languages. The Union government shelling out loads of money to promote only Hindi, is decimating the very idea of India. We aren’t second class citizens of the Indian union.”

Echoing this point, but by offering alternatives, was Tara Krishnaswamy from the Citizens for Bengaluru. She tweeted: “India isn’t an island. Want most spoken language internally & externally, it’s English. Want Indian language spoken officially in max countries, it’s Tamizh. You want ancient Indian language - take Kannada, Odia, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali.”

The backlash was more pronounced among the Tamil-speaking Twitterati. One of them, Umamaheshwaran P Selvam, gave the issue a techno twist with this telling tweet: “If Tamilians desperately need to learn some language other than Tamil and English, we'll choose C ,C ++ and Java. We learnt the above along with COBOL and FORTRAN and we have changed the livelihood of many.”