New Delhi: Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Thursday said Hindi should be accepted as an alternative to English and not to local languages.
Presiding over the 37th meeting of the Parliamentary Official Language Committee here, Shah said 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, according to a statement issued by the Union Home Ministry.
He informed the members that now 70 per cent of the agenda of the Cabinet is prepared in Hindi.
Shah said now the time has come to make the official language Hindi an important part of the unity of the country.
He said Hindi should be accepted as an alternative to English and not to local languages, according to the statement.
He said unless Hindi is made flexible by accepting words from other local languages, it will not be propagated.
The home minister said when citizens of states, who speak different languages, communicate with each other, it should be in "the language of India", the statement said.
Three points
Shah emphasised on three main points. Firstly, the committee is requested to hold a meeting in July for implementation of the recommendations made from 1st to 11th volumes of its report.
Shah said the Secretary of the Official Language Committee should inform the members about the implementation of the volume-wise report in that meeting.
Under the second point, he stressed the need to give elementary knowledge of Hindi to students up to Class 9 and pay more attention to Hindi teaching examinations.
Under the third point, the home minister suggested to republish the Hindi dictionary by revising it, the statement said.
On this occasion, Shah unanimously approved the sending of the 11th volume of the committee's report to the President.
He said the pace at which the current Official Language Committee is working has rarely been seen before.
The home minister said sending three reports to the President in the same tenure of the committee is a joint achievement of all.
He said after meeting with all secretaries concerned, an Implementation Committee should be constituted to review the progress of implementing recommendations of the 1st to 11th volumes of the Official Language Committee report.
He said 22,000 Hindi teachers have been recruited in eight northeastern states.
Also, nine tribal communities of the Northeast have converted their dialects' scripts to Devanagari.
Apart from this, all the eight states of the Northeast have agreed to make Hindi compulsory in schools up to Class 10, the statement said.
Won't brook 'Hindi imperialism': Opposition leaders
Meanwhile, Amit Shah's pitch for the Hindi language provoked trenchant criticism, with opposition parties calling it an assault on India's pluralism and asserting they will thwart the move to impose "Hindi imperialism".
The main opposition Congress accused Shah of trying to impose Hindi, and said in doing so he is doing a disservice to the language.
Congress leader Jairam Ramesh contended Hindi is 'Raj Bhasha' (official language) and not 'Rashtra Bhasha' (national language), as Rajnath Singh had noted in Parliament when he was the home minister.
"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," Ramesh said on Twitter.
Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin, whose DMK has been at the forefront of anti-Hindi agitations which often turned violent, said Shah's thrust on Hindi went against India's 'integrity and pluralism'.
"Does @AmitShah think that 'Hindi state' is enough and Indian states are not needed?" he asked. The Tamil Nadu chief minister insisted a single language will not help the cause of unity.
"You are making the same mistake again and again. However, you will not succeed!" Stalin tweeted.
West Bengal's ruling TMC said any effort to impose Hindi by the BJP-led Centre on non-Hindi speaking states will be resisted.
Noting that Hindi is not India's national language, the TMC said Shah's agenda of "one nation, one language and one religion" will remain unfulfilled.
