The Congress party has cleared its stand on the imposition of Hindi language in the non-Hindi speaking states. The grand old party is all set to oppose any move to implement Hindi in the non-speaking states after a controversy erupted since Union HM Amit Shah said that Hindi should be accepted as an alternative language to English.
“It’s not an easy thing as the non-Hindi speaking states will not accept it and we will oppose any such move. However I speak Hindi, but people will not accept this, the government should see the history, see what had happened before on the issue. The BJP is testing the waters by creating an issue and promoting division in the country but the Congress party will oppose any such move when and if the government enforces it”, said B K Hariprasad, senior Congress leader and Leader of Opposition in the Karnataka Legislative Council to IANS.
Presiding over the 37th meeting of the Parliamentary Official Language Committee, the union Home Minister Amit Shah had said:
“Unless we make Hindi flexible by accepting words from other local languages, it will not be propagated”.
The union Home Minister informed the members that nine tribal communities of the North East have converted their dialects’ scripts to Devanagari while all the eight states have agreed to make Hindi compulsory in schools up to Class 10. He also informed that now 70 per cent of the agenda of the Cabinet is prepared in Hindi and over 22,000 Hindi teachers have been recruited in the eight states of the North East.
Though the BJP too knows the implications and its Tamil Nadu unit has said that there is no move to implement any language forcefully.
Senior Congress leader Jairam Ramesh tweeted:
“Hindi is Raj Bhasha, not Rashtra Bhasha, as Rajnath Singh said in Parliament when he was HM. Hindi imperialism will be the death knell for India. I’m very comfortable with Hindi, but I don’t want it rammed down anybody’s throat. Amit Shah is doing a disservice to Hindi by imposing it”.
Union Home Minister Amit Shah had emphasised that there is a need to give elementary knowledge of Hindi to students up to Class nine and to pay more attention to Hindi teaching exams.
He said that after meeting all the concerned Secretaries, an Implementation Committee should be constituted to review the progress of implementing the recommendations of the 1st to 11th volumes of the Official Language Committee report.
“Prime Minister Narendra Modi has decided that the medium of running the government is the Official Language and this will definitely increase the importance of Hindi”, he further added.
Meanwhile, Congress ally DMK, that is the ruling party in Tamil Nadu, has also opposed it vehemently.
“It would destroy national integration”, said M. Karunanidhi’s son and the current CM of Tamil Nadu, M.K. Stalin while strongly opposing the Union Home Minister’s statement.
‘Murasoli’, the mouthpiece of DMK, said:
“Party patriarch and former CM late M. Karunanidhi, had, as a 14-year-old student, marched across the streets of Tirupattur against the then Central government’s move to impose Hindi on the people of the state”.
“The people of Tamil Nadu have still not forgotten the rally taken out by Karunanidhi against Hindi”, it said, adding: “Do not forget it”.
The article asserted that there were no cowards in the state and that Hindi cannot be imposed on them.
