Why is there so much fuss about Hindi?

From time to time the diatribe against the imposition of Hindi on non-Hindi speaking people of India has become a sort of fashion, or rather a political weapon, to be flashed in public in order to flaunt nothing but a form of hollow chauvinism – it could be termed anything like provincial, regional, linguistic, ethnic, etc. – and mislead the innocent people with a fake sense of psychological safety against an imperial or federal onslaught. For reasons better known than often told, Hindi has been seen as a symbol of imposition and a threat to the pluralistic identities of India.

But strangely, the same threat is not felt for English, which, warns the prominent French linguist Claude Hagege, “may eventually kill most other languages". That itself says a lot about all these protests. These are just selfish acts of politics “concerned with the self-interest of a pugnacious nationalism”, to use Tagore’s apt words. I dragged Tagore into this because his views about “nationalism” are perhaps the most practical and relevant ones, even today. The “nationalism” he has referred to would be very clear from what he has to say about “nation”.

“We have no word for Nation in our language,” he clarifies. “When we borrow this word from other people, it never fits us… Not for us, is this mad orgy of midnight, with lighted torches…”
Orgy of midnight, with lighted torches? Did the poet have a premonition of all the candle-lit vigils at the India Gate?

We will come back to Tagore. For now, let’s talk about something more recent. The moment the draft of the National Education Policy 2019 was made public, “lighted torches” came out in the night, accusing of, the same thing – imposition of Hindi.

I actually went through the draft.

It says, “Because research now clearly shows that children pick up languages extremely quickly between the ages of 2 and 8, and moreover that multilingualism has great cognitive benefits to students, children will now be immersed in three languages early on, starting from the Foundational Stage onwards.”

It then goes on elaborating the Three Language Formula: “[It] will need to be implemented in its spirit throughout the country, promoting multilingual communicative abilities for a multilingual country. However, it must be better implemented in certain States, particularly Hindi Speaking States; for purposes of national integration, schools in Hindi speaking areas should also offer and teach Indian languages from other parts of India. This would help raise the status of all Indian languages…”

What’s offensive in this? I don’t see any.

Just in case people think that the draft came from some arbitrary people, it must be reminded that the chairman of the committee is none other than K. Kasturirangan, former Chairman of ISRO. Few members are Vasudha Kamat, former Vice-Chancellor of the SNDT Women's University, Bombay, Manjul Bhargava, R. Brandon Fradd Professor of Mathematics at the Princeton University, USA, Mazhar Asif Member, Professor at the Centre for Persian and Central Asian Studies, School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, and others. I don’t think these people could be categorized into any genre of arbitrariness.

In case people have second thoughts about the benefits of multilingualism, let’s consider these.

Brainscape, committed to improving how the world studies, using the latest cognitive science research, has cited many benefits of being multilingual. Multilingual people, they say, tend to be more effective communicators. Multilingualism can even delay the onset of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease by an average of five years! Multilingual people better perform on tasks that require high-level thought, multitasking, and sustained attention. Perhaps this is why they are often seen as more intelligent than peers with similar innate intelligence, education, and background. They tend to solve complex problems in more creative ways than their monolingual peers, no matter what kind of problem is being solved. They are faster learners, more likely to make rational decisions, keen observers of the world around them, and more skilled at identifying and correctly analyzing the sub-context of a situation and interpreting the social environment.

An article in The Guardian says, multilingualism has been shown to have many social, psychological and lifestyle advantages.

To the question whether we should raise our children to be multilingual, The British Academy says, “My answer is an unconditional yes.”

In addition to facilitating cross-cultural communication, a paper says, multilingualism enables children as young as seven months to better adjust to environmental changes and seniors to experience less cognitive decline.

So I believe the question why three languages should be taught from early days is answered quite well. Let’s move on to the most important thing – the explosive topic of learning Hindi for non-Hindi speaking people.

Let’s rewind a bit. In 1918 Gandhi wrote a letter to Tagore asking if Hindi could be the “possible national language for inter-provincial intercourse in India”. Tagore’s answer was very interesting. “Of course Hindi is the only possible national language for interprovincial intercourse in India,” he asserted. “But… I think we cannot enforce it for a long time to come. In the first place, it is truly a foreign language for the Madras people, and in the second, most of [us] will find it extremely difficult to express [ourselves] adequately in this language for no fault of [our] own. So, Hindi will have to remain optional in our national proceedings until a new generation… fully alive to its importance, pave the way towards its general use by constant practice as a voluntary acceptance of a national obligation.”

Almost 20 years later, in 1937, Tagore wrote to Gandhi, “It is imperative … to organize an all-India movement to foster and spread the growth of a language which is potentially capable of being adopted as a common medium of communication between the different provinces… However, I hope that the language which is to claim allegiance as the lingua franca will prove and maintain its complete freedom from any communal bias…”

Intentionally I didn’t cite any or Gandhi’s words in favor of a lingua franca for India, because I felt, Tagore’s views are more universal in many aspects, and hence shouldn’t be colored either with left or right. Interestingly, Gandhi, who went a long way fighting for Hindi to be made as National Language (which hasn’t been ever implemented), and Tagore, both were non-Hindi speakers. But still they felt the need of a lingua franca, which has more relevance to trade and commerce than anything else. If the provinces were to stay in isolation, then there wouldn’t be the need for any lingua franca. But then, no province can grow in isolation. Unless there’s exchange of money and mind (thoughts), no race, province, nation can ever grow. And the first step for such an exchange is a common language, a lingua franca.

Neither Gandhi nor Tagore could be accused of anti-colonialism in not choosing English as the lingua franca. Whoever thinks that as an option is surely not a practical person. It’s ludicrous to think that a mason from Bengal and working at a construction site in Gujarat would bargain in English with the local fisherman, or, a Central Government employee from Madras, transferred to Assam, would teach the local cook, in English, how to make good sambar. It’s a no brainer that, even now, more than hundred years after Tagore had written that letter to Gandhi in 1918, Hindi is still the most likely solution to Tagore’s lingua franca for cross communication between provinces.

Many centuries ago, even the Mughals had felt the need of a lingua franca, for better administration and trade across the vast country of many races and languages. They too chose the prevalent Hindustani language of the day as the lingua franca. Of course they introduced a lot of Persian and Arabic words of administrative and judicial use. Thus, the Sauraseni Prakrit language of the medieval India, the immediate ancestor of Hindi during the first millennium, got a little different flavor in the second millennium, which later took the name Urdu, perhaps coming from the word vardi, meaning uniform, implicating that the language was nothing but a lingua franca for the people in uniform – either in the army or government jobs. Like Gandhi and Tagore, wisdom prevailed among the Mughals – they didn’t try to make Persian, their preferred language, the lingua franca. Persian, like English, stayed the official language for education, art and literature, whereas the lingua franca was the native Hindustani-Urdu.

More than two millennia ago, Ashoka too had a lingua franca –  a form of the Magadhi Prakrit language (forefather of Bengali) spoken in Magadha, comprising present day Bihar and Bengal, Ashoka’s native. It might be relevant to note that in all of Kalidas’ Sanskrit dramas, the dialogues of the common people – the artisans, peasants, fishermen, even thieves – were always in Magadhi Prakrit, wherever they would be from. The only plausible reason for this could be that, Magadhi Prakrit was indeed the lingua franca of the common people across the country.

Ashoka’s rock edicts, few of which have survived till date across the Indian subcontinent, from Kandahar in Afghanistan to Bangladesh, from Delhi to Karnataka, had local variants of the Magadhi Prakrit, depending of the location, very much like the present day lingua franca, Hindi, which is spoken in different variants in different parts of India. The caricature and type cast of the Hindi spoken by the Bengalis and the South Indians, as immortalized in Bollywood by Asit Sen/Keshto Mukherjee and Mehmood respectively, says all about lingua franca – it’s more of a sort of an assortment of a number of mutually intelligible creoles rather than any uniform grammatically correct language. You like it or not, Hindi has already acquired that stature and no other language can replace that, how much ever “mad orgy of midnight, with lighted torches” you do!

Going further back, even during the times of the Indus Valley Civilization, in the second and third millennia BC, the entire Central Asia, the melting pot of civilizations, races, cultures and languages, extending into parts of northwestern India, is believed to have had a lingua franca – the Burushaski language, vestiges of which now exist only in a few villages in Kashmir. Quite interestingly, the word Sindhu, the eponymous river which lent the names and identities to India, Hindu, Hindi, Hindustan, and even Indonesia (literally meaning Indian Islands), and the far off Indians of the Americas and the West Indies, is of Burushaski origin – it has survived as a linguistic fossil of the once grand language and the lingua franca of the most important locus in the annals of human civilization.

Lingua franca is the foundation for growth and prosperity, without which, the people survive in isolation, without any interaction and exchange of mind and money. Bangalore reaped the benefit of exchange, as it was never averse to the lingua franca, Hindi, and hence attracted labor and talent pool from all across India, thus boosting the growth of the city. From a sleepy pensioner’s paradise even thirty years back, it’s now the forth richest city in India (with respect to overall contribution to GDP, after Bombay, Delhi and Calcutta), much ahead of Madras, which is still averse to Hindi. Not many people would feel comfortable relocating to Madras. But no one would have a second thought about Bangalore. Almost the entire construction industry in Bangalore is supported by laborers from Bihar, Bengal and Orissa, as is the new age IT, ITES and BT industries by people from all across India.

Despite all the hullabaloo about “Bombay for Marathas”, Bombay is still the most cosmopolitan city in India, attracting people from all walks of life – Bollywood is the biggest example. Bombay’s like a miniature India, and not surprisingly, the lingua franca is Hindi. No wonder it’s the richest city in India. Calcutta too, till very recently when the CM started talking about the Hindi speaking outsiders, was never averse to Hindi and outsiders from any part of India. That corroborates its position as the third richest city in India.

It’s not for nothing that the Tamil speaking Shiv Nadar, co-founder and present Chairman of the USD 8.5 billion HCL, famously said that Hindi shaped his career. He even asked students in Tamil Nadu to learn Hindi. Knowing Hindi immediately breaks many social barriers. In one moment, everyone becomes a member of a single large fraternity, irrespective of the backgrounds, castes, creeds. I realized this the best the moment I landed in Kharagpur, at the IIT. The initial discomfort in communicating in Hindi was overcome soon and I slowly started speaking a heavily accented Bong version of Hindi – not much different from how Bollywood depicts. Everyone at the IIT knew English, but it was only in Hindi that we could share the camaraderie and bonhomie which remained with us forever. The same level of jokes and jibes and fun and frolic is unthinkable in English, not because it’s incapable of the same level of humor, but because it perhaps lacks the mitti ki khushboo, the smell of the Indian soil which only a highly agile and extremely fluid variant of Hindi (or Hinglish, whatever you may call) has.

It’s quite clear that anyone who would be averse to learning the lingua franca would do more harm to the community or fraternity than any good. Relevant are Tagore’s words, again. “Swaraj is not our objective,” he says, in criticism to the overt “nationalism” during the pre-independence era. “Our fight is a spiritual fight, it is for Man. We are to emancipate Man from the meshes that he himself has woven round him — these organizations of National Egoism.” Language chauvinism is just another organization of egoism, nothing else, and the protectionism of the language in the name of nationalism is nothing but the “meshes … woven around”. Tagore adds, “The butterfly will have to be persuaded that the freedom of the sky is of higher value than the shelter of the cocoon.” Any sort of protectionism is nothing but sad attempts at keeping people in cocoons.

The very thought that a language would be threatened by Hindi is nothing but demeaning that language, trying to protect the language in a cocoon.

That’s bondage.

That’s like breaking the world “into fragments by narrow domestic walls”.

Not Islamophobia, it was the Hindutvaphobia of the opposition which attempted futilely to divide the country

Just after the results of the General Election 2019 were out, all hell broke loose among a section of people and media, who had expected very badly an anti-BJP government to come to power. Their hatred for BJP and Modi is so great that they were fine even with the directionless and narrative less Congress and the motley group of corrupt politicians like Lallu, Mayawati, Mulayam and many more, all of whom have dismal records when it comes to human rights, safety and development, forget corruption.

Someone said, “India is a full blown fascist country. Its transformation to fascism is now complete. Majority of Indians that voted this fascist political outfit are fascists. Once we recognize these basic facts, we can begin considering appropriate strategic responses to India and Indians…”

Someone else made a clarion call, “Those friends who are still sane, still believe in love and solidarity, like my friends in Calcutta, shall we walk the street tomorrow, in a walk where we talk about togetherness, sing about love, standing with our neighbors who speak to different Gods? This day is so disheartening, scary, unnerving!”

A major media house in the west scared the hell out of everyone. “Intoxicating voters,” it cried, “with the seductive passion of vengeance, and grandiose fantasies of power and domination, Mr. Modi has deftly escaped public scrutiny of his record of raw wisdom… He triumphantly reaped one of the biggest electoral harvests of the post-truth age, giving us more reason to fear the future…”

Fascism might be an understatement. What had been the narrative of a section of people, obsessed with liberalism and secularism, was actually a myth about Hindutvaphobia, a fear of a mysterious demonic entity that would devour the whole country and regress her to the stone ages of violence and darkness. It was as though, a group of illiterate and uncouth people from the hinterlands of India, without any basic wisdom and knowledge of Indian culture and civilization, of what all India stands for – things like pluralism, inclusiveness, etc. – have suddenly occupied the hallowed seats of power, of course through deceit and magic, and want to unleash their frenzied dark energies into the society and take full control over the lives and ways of the country’s elite and intellectuals, who have taken to themselves the grandiose task of maintaining the secular fabric of the country and upholding all the values and righteousness they have been custodian of, since God knows when.

Rarely has there been such vicious attacks, by a section of the media and intelligentsia, on the people in power, purely because the latter doesn’t align with the ideologies and thoughts of the former. And lo, the former are the ones who talk about liberalism and tolerance, where as they come about as the most intolerant to anyone who wouldn’t belong to their fraternity. Not only upon the BJP, the ire of the former very soon fell upon everyone who voted them back to power, again. So, the 38% of the Indian electorate became “fascists” and gullible of being “intoxicated” and “seduced by passion of vengeance”.

Overnight, the Modi haters came up with theories of massive consolidation of the Hindu votes against the myth of Islamophobia, allegedly purported by the BJP. In doing so, they totally ignored the real reasons behind Modi’s stupendous win. Rather, I would say, they were so blind in their own vision that they couldn’t see the realities on ground.

In the 2019 General Election, BJP has got around 38% vote share and 303 or 53% of the total seats, against Congress’ 20% vote share and 52 or 9% seats. In fact, in the seats where BJP contested, its vote share was as high as 46%.

With 37.6% vote share in rural constituencies, BJP has improved its performance in non-urban areas by close to 7%. In the seats it contested in rural areas, its vote share was close to 46%, compared to Congress’ 23%. This is totally in contradiction to the stories of rural distress, propagated so much by the opposition. I don’t imply here that there was no rural distress at all, but I do have reasons to say that the rural electorate did see some value in getting BJP or rather Modi back to power, if not we accept the ridiculous proposition, put forward by many, that Indians don’t know what they have done.

BJP has got 42% votes from the least (quartile) educated and around 40% from the least prosperous people in India, improving its tally with the latter by almost 30%.

It has improved its vote share in the SC and ST constituencies by 6-7%. It has got 11% more votes from areas with significant Dalit population. More people from the Adivasi dominated areas have voted for BJP than they did in 2014.

Interestingly, BJP has increased its vote share by close to 10% in areas with 20-40% Muslim population. Overall, around 11% Muslims have voted for BJP in 2019, compared to 8% in 2014, which is a close to 40% improvement. For instance, the vote share of BJP has increased by 5-10% in the Muslim dominating Shivajinagar, Chamarajpet and Shanthinagar assembly constituencies in Bangalore, compared to 2014.

Close to 50% of the GenZ population (born after 1996), all first time voters, have opted for BJP.

So, BJP has been accepted over a large spectrum of electorate.

A little engagement with the masses would have made it very clear what the pulse of the nation was before the election. Few anecdotes would make things very clear.

One day, a month before the election, my wife had asked me if I knew anything about a scheme called Saubhagya. I vaguely remembered the name – one of the many schemes launched by Modi in the past five years. I asked her the context. She said that our maid, Kamala, had given her a lecture in the morning about many such schemes – she managed to remember only one name. What I figured out was that, Kamala was actually trying to “sell” Modi to my wife, because she had an inkling that the “rich” people, perhaps not among the beneficiaries of any of Modi’s schemes, might not bring him back at the helm of everything once more. She was worried that they, the “poor” people had lot to lose if Modi didn’t come back to power. Kamala is from a village in Karnataka, not far from Bangalore.

The next day I asked my driver, Sunil, whom he would vote for. He proudly told me that he hails from the same village as Aravind Limbavali, the BJP MLA from Mahadevpura, the assembly constituency we are part of. He pleaded me to vote for BJP. I asked him why he liked BJP so much. He requested me to come to his village and find it out myself. His village, he claimed excitedly, is not much different from the place we stay in Bangalore. Many roads there, he said, were better than Bangalore. Few days later he flashed his RuPay debit card. He also talked about the new LPG connection at his house. He was proud that he too had the privileges which had been merely aspirational to “them” in the past, privileges which only the “rich” in the cities had, but were now a reality even in his village.

Both Kamala and Sunil felt they were empowered.

Last year, I’d been to Delhi for some work and I’d taken a cab on rent for day. I have the habit of chit chatting with the cab drivers as I always get to know a lot of interesting facts and figures from them – the facts which are generally not published in the main stream media. I asked him what did he think about Yogi Adityanath’s government in UP, now that it was almost a year since he had come to power. He smiled sarcastically and sneered at me. “You, the educated lot,” he mocked, “you won’t understand.” That was rather rude, I felt. “The police have started working finally [in UP],” he said. “Isn’t that a badi baat, a big thing?” I remembered, some time ago another cab driver too had told me a similar thing about the Delhi cops. “Since Kejriwal becamethe CM,” he had told me, “we’re no longer harassed by the police. I have the number of my MLA – the son-of-a-bitch-police know very well that I can call him anytime…”

For the lesser privileged, or rather the “poor”, I realized, the taming of the police was also a sort of empowerment – it gave them a sort of psychological safety.

After the 2019 General Election, when I was trying to figure out what magic had Modi done, I remembered Kamala and Sunil and the Delhi cab drivers. The empowerment came in various forms.

15 Million people have subscribed for the Atal Pension Yojana, a government co-contribution scheme to assure a monthly income up to INR 5000 after the age of 60, for all employees in unorganized sector. 

There are around 360 Million beneficiaries of the Jan Dhan Yojana, one of the earliest welfare schemes launched by Modi. It’s a massive financial inclusion scheme, which starts with a bank account, a RuPay debit card, an INR 5000 overdraft facility and an INR 1 Lakh accident insurance. The main usefulness of this scheme is actually the immediate transfer of all benefits from the government directly to the account holders, by-passing any middleman. More than USD 100 Billion worth of benefits have been already transferred till date directly to the account holders. 

Close to 60 Million have subscribed to the Jeevan Jyoti Bima Yojona, an insurance scheme for all account holders, with a premium of roughly INR 1 per day, and a life coverage of INR 2 Lakh.

1.5 Lakh Km of roads have been constructed in villages across India, under the Gram Sadak Yojana. Commuting to and from a village to the nearest big hospital or school or workplace at a town closely is no longer a tyranny of fate.

Non-Corporate Small Business Sector (NCSBS), comprising small manufacturing units, shopkeepers, fruits and vegetable vendors, truck and taxi operators, artisans, street vendors and many others, is perhaps one of the largest disaggregated business ecosystems in the world, sustaining around 500 million lives in India. The Mudra Yojana, aimed at extending, among others, financial support, in the form of refinance, to this sector, has sanctioned 180 Million loans, amounting to about USD 130 Billion.

Under the Awas Yojana, aiming at providing a pucca house with basic amenities to all houseless householder and those households living in kutcha and dilapidated house, financial assistance up to INR 1.5 Lakh per house has been provided for the construction of more than 15 Million houses.

As per the Fasal Bima Yojana, aiming at supporting sustainable production in agriculture sector by providing financial aid to farmers suffering crop loss/damage due to unforeseen events, among others, the farmers have to pay only 1.5-5% of the sum insured as the premium, with the government paying more than double the amount. The calculator available at the official website of the scheme gives an idea of the premiums. For example, the farmer’s contribution to the premium for insuring 1000 hectares of land for cotton cultivation in the kharif season in Latur district of Maharashtra would be INR 2.15 Lakh, with government chipping in INR 4.73 Lakh, for a sum insured of INR 4.3 Crore. Close to 150 Million insurance covers have been registered under this scheme till date.

More than 25 Million households have been electrified under the Saubhagya scheme. More than 100 Million toilets have been constructed under Swachh Bharat. More than 70 Million LPG connections have been released under Ujjwala Yojana.

Even a pessimistic estimate would reveal that more than 200 Million households would have been benefited from one or more schemes launched by Modi. That’s more than 400 Million adults or around 40% of the total electorate. So, it shouldn’t be a surprise that BJP got a vote share of around 38%.

Turning a blind eye to such magnanimous amount of welfare, and designating the 38% of the electorate as “fascist” people, who voted for BJP just because of Islamophobia, or because of their zeal for creating a Muslim-free society where Hindutva would rule the roost, is not just ludicrous, but also, I would say, racist, intolerant, parochial and above all, utterly stupid. It reminds me of the opening lines of a poem from Tagore’s Gitanjali – I’ve conceded defeat! Whenever I wanted to push you, I’ve only hurt myself. I would rather like to paraphrase it: You’ve been defeated. Whenever you’ve wanted to push [them], you’ve only hurt yourself. 

The vitriolic and venomous attack on Modi, calling him “chor” when not a single scam from his tenure could be proved till date, spreading the fear of Hindutva and indirectly painting the entire Hindu community as an intolerant fraternity who would kill all its Muslim neighbors the moment Modi would return to power, the repeated usage of the terms like “Hindu Terror” just to counter balance the rise of the Islamic Jihadi terrorism worldwide and more closely in Kashmir, supported by Pakistan, would have turned any Hindu, who perhaps was not a great fan of Modi, away from the Modi hating opposition. 

So actually, it was not Modi that has divided the country through any rhetoric of Islamophobia and consolidated the Hindu votes against his opponents, but it was rather the latter, who have united almost the whole country against their hypocrisy, against their demeaning of the Indians in the name of Hindutvaphobia, against their baseless propagating of the fear of an apocalypse should Modi come to power again.

Having said that, it doesn’t mean that the issues of mob violence against the cow traders, the communal barbs from the fringe elements of the BJP, the increase in unemployment, the increasing distress among the farmers in many parts of the country are all concocted. Modi has to surely tackle all these. But many of these were blown out of proportion for the sake of creating an air of Hindutvaphobia. Few fringe and stray incidents don’t skew the statistics of the overall crime and violence of any form, whether communal or not. Each crime needs to be investigated and the criminals punished, whether it’s communal or political or otherwise. 

It’s the collective wisdom of the Indian electorate that they chose wisely. Despite the ills and negatives – no one can be sacrosanct – they still felt they had some sort of psychological safety and a sense of empowerment in Modi’s tenure, whether it’s his schemes or the surgical strikes against anyone who raises against the country.