The insistence of the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the national adoption of the Hindi, the main language of the north of India, attracted the anger of certain states, which saw him as a decision which would destroy their cultural heritage.
In the linguistically diverse independent, the taxation of the Hindi has always sparked tensions among states and the central government.
High -level fights recently broke out on Modi’s push for the national adoption of Hindi, the language of its power base in northern India and a symbol of its campaign to unify the country around the ideology of Hindu nationalism, the New York Times reported on Sunday.
In the Maharashtra, a state of Western India governed by Modi’s party – the Bharatiya Janata (BJP) party, was forced to withdraw a policy requiring the Hindi to be taught in elementary schools last month.
Opposition politicians, residents and others had described marathi’s policy, the region’s mother tongue, according to the report.
In another state, the chief minister of Tamil Nadu has raged for months against an education policy pushed by the Modi government for the adoption of the Hindi, saying that he is trying to force students to learn the language.
This state in southern India has a history of riots on efforts to make Hindi compulsory.
Tamil Nadu continued the central government in May after declaring that it would refuse the education funds until the state has implemented politics.
“It is common sense that pushing a language to harm national integration and the unity of a linguistically diverse nation such as India,” said the Niranjanaradhya VP, an activist who studies how education affects the development of childhood.
“It is because of this imposition that there is so much resistance from people.”
Central government officials have taken care to publicly emphasize that the force of India lies in its linguistic diversity. When attacking one of the languages of India, their target is English, calling it a heritage of colonialism which must be subject to insufficiency to build a new India.
Hindi and English are the two official languages of India, and Hindi is the mother tongue of the largest group of Indians.
The leaders of the BJP in power made the propagation of the Hindi a cornerstone of their primordial objective of redoing India in a Hindu nation and government officials of Modi Reference more and more in the country like Bharat, a name derived from Sanskrit.
The Modi government has regularly promoted Hindi across the country by appointing new public programs, as for education, agriculture or development, in the language.
Tamil Nadu refused to respect this policy, which, according to the government of the State, is a means of forcing the teaching of the Hindi.
His senior leader, MK Stalin, said that his condition did not need Hindi because he has produced alphabetization rates high in Tamil and English.
The Tamil Nadu and other southern states fear that the imposition of the Hindi will destroy their cultural heritage, including a family of languages with Dravidian rather than Sanskrites.
In the Maharashtra, the problem began in April after the chief minister will become Fadnavis published a diktat according to which the Hindi would be compulsory in elementary schools, in addition to English and marathi.
The flame return was immense. Sushil Kedia, an investor, was tried after publishing on social networks that he had struggled to learn the marathi despite his long -standing resident of the state. Vandals also attacked his offices. Kedia later apologized for his comments.
When government efforts to push Hindi create indignation, they often also generate political opportunities.
The fight against marathi brought together two eminent state politicians, far from the cousins who fell nearly two decades ago and created their own political parties, said that the Nyt report.
The two marked their triumph during the weekend during a celebration rally.
The Thackeray reunion became before the important municipal elections and after the Maharashtra state elections in 2024, during which the two parties led by Thackeray suffered major losses.
On Saturday, Stalin, the chief of the Tamil Nadu, congratulated the two for their “victory”. In an article on X, he declared that the campaign to reject the taxation of the Hindi had “transcended the boundaries of the state”.
