Reading between the lines of BJP's Hindi imposition

Northern India is also the BJP's primary electoral catchment — it won over 66% of its seats from the north Indian Hindi belt in 2014

For its sustenance and spread, the Hindutva agenda needs grand temples. But it needs jobs too. The BJP-ruled Centre is constructing a "Bhavya Ram Mandir" in Ayodhya under the auspices of a trust. It will be ready by January 2024, three months before the Lok Sabha polls. But what about the question of jobs?

Protests erupted twice this year — in Bihar in January relating to railway jobs, and in June across a large swathe of northern India, after the Centre announced its Agniveer scheme. Thousands of youth indulged in arson and violence to vent their frustration over the lack of jobs. Northern India is also the BJP's primary electoral catchment — it won over 66 per cent of its seats from the north Indian Hindi belt in 2014, and a similar percentage in 2019.

So, in June, Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted that the Centre would fill 10 lakh vacancies in central government jobs by December 2023. Coincidentally, in its latest report, the Committee of Parliament on Official Language, headed by Union Home Minister Amit Shah, has recommended that knowledge of Hindi be ensured for the selection of employees for central government jobs.

On October 22, Prime Minister Narendra Modi held a 'rozgar mela', a job fair, the first of its kind, where he and Union Ministers distributed appointment letters for central government jobs to 75,000 youths. He promised such 'job fairs' would be held periodically.

A regional or state-wise breakup of those who found jobs is yet to be made available. However, after the media reported on the report of the parliamentary committee in early October, Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan flagged the connection between Hindi knowledge and employment in a strongly-worded letter he sent to the PM on October 11. He said the youth of the country had limited job opportunities in the government sector, and any attempt to put a substantial section of them at a relative disadvantage will not be in the best interest of the society.

"I take this opportunity to suggest that question papers for competitive exams for posts in the Government of India may be given in all languages specified in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution," Vijayan said in his letter. A day later, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said every state should have the right to use its language, and if the students want to write exams in it, they should be allowed.

On October 16, Tamil Nadu CM M K Stalin wrote to the PM opposing the Parliamentary panel's "recommendation" that aspirants should be proficient in Hindi to be hired for specific jobs. Subsequently, the Tamil Nadu Assembly passed a unanimous resolution against the Centre's Hindi imposition. "We have to think that these recommendations have been made to ensure that non-Hindi speakers do not get Union government jobs," he wrote.

"They (the Parliamentary panel) have openly announced that only Hindi speakers can get government jobs by saying all exams will be conducted only in Hindi. Such a move will remove non-Hindi speakers from the national mainstream," Stalin said. Telangana minister K T Rama Rao also opposed the panel's recommendations.

Over the past month, political parties' youth wings have protested against the Centre's "Hindi imposition" in Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Students' unions have been protesting the conducting of certain recruitment exams only in Hindi and English. In 2019, aspirants protested that postal entrance examinations were held only in Hindi and English when, until 2018, they were held in 15 languages, including Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu.

Apart from the electoral expediency behind the move, Hindi imposition has brought back memories of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh's slogan of 'Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan' in the early years of democratic India. The slogan was shrewdly buried when it gained notoriety and conflicted with the Sangh Parivar's efforts at expanding into the southern states. Political commentator Radhika Ramaseshan says the push for Hindi is consistent with the BJP's strategy of not recognising India's plurality and diversity.

"Many eastern and southern Indians would and do learn Hindi for their functional needs, but the problem is the coercion and political agenda behind the imposition of Hindi when solutions such as the 'three language formula' are available," Ramaseshan says.

On Saturday, CPI(M) Rajya Sabha MP John Brittas flagged an example of coercion in imposing Hindi on non-Hindi-speaking states. In a three-page letter to the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, the nodal ministry for the Members of Parliament Local Area Development Scheme (MPLADS), Brittas protested the ministry's new draft guidelines on MPLADS funds. Brittas objected to the proposal to erect a plaque under MPLADS in "regional language as well as in Hindi and English", indicating details of the project.

The MP said the existing guidelines did not have any such condition. "Any enforced directive to depict details of work in the Hindi language in non-Hindi speaking states can only be considered an infringement of federal principles," he said.

The BJP, and other Hindi votaries, have also long felt the need to link the language to technical education. On Friday, Uttarakhand Minister of Health, Education and Cooperative Dhan Singh Rawat said the state's medical colleges would also teach medical courses in Hindi from the next academic session. He said the decision had been taken, given the special importance being given by the Centre to Hindi.

Uttarakhand is a BJP-ruled state. The minister said a four-member expert committee will prepare a draft of a new syllabus for colleges after studying the Hindi MBBS syllabus in government colleges of Madhya Pradesh. On October 16, Amit Shah released textbooks in Hindi for three subjects for MBBS students as part of the Madhya Pradesh government's efforts to impart medical education in Hindi.

At the event in Bhopal, Shah released textbooks in Hindi for Anatomy, Medical Biochemistry and Medical Physiology.

State Minister of Medical Education Vishvas Kailash Sarang said 97 faculty members of the Gandhi Medical College spent more than 200 days translating the textbooks into Hindi.

But as Madhya Pradesh Congress President Kamal Nath pointed out, such projects have pitfalls. In 2016, the Bhopal-based Atal Bihari Vajpayee Hindi Vishwavidyalaya started an engineering course in Hindi, but the course was closed later. According to those in the know, the course had to be stopped as the All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) had not approved it. Additionally, the few students who took admission in the Hindi course eventually switched to the English course.

The Madhya Pradesh government is confident that the Hindi MBBS course will not meet the fate of the engineering course. Unlike the engineering course, where technical terms were translated into pedantic Hindi, the MBBS textbooks retain the English words in use but transliterate them into Devanagari script.

Ramaseshan, who has observed the BJP for over three decades, believes the party should be careful while dealing with language issues. These could be equally, if not more sensitive than those related to religion, as contemporary South Asian history tells us, whether in the struggle for the creation of linguistic states or nations.