Chennai: Once again, the persistent push for Hindi has faced stiff resistance from the Dravidian heartland. A day after Union Home Minister Amit Shah advocated that Hindi must be accepted without opposition, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister and DMK president MK Stalin and leaders of other political parties have condemned it sensing a 'sinister design' in it.
Describing Shah's advocacy for Hindi as a blatant attempt to subjugate non-Hindi speakers, Stalin took to Twitter and said, “I strongly denounce Union Home Minister @AmitShah's audacious push for Hindi acceptance. It is a blatant attempt to subjugate non-Hindi speakers. Tamil Nadu rejects any form of Hindi hegemony imposition. Our language and heritage define us – we won't be enslaved by Hindi.”
Striking solidarity with other states, which are opposed to Hindi, the Chief Minister continued, “Many states like Karnataka and West Bengal also have been vehemently resisting #HindiImposition. Hon'ble @AmitShah, please take heed of the growing resistance! Igniting the embers of the '1965 Anti-Hindi Agitations' would be an unwise move.”
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In the same tweet in Tamil, Stalin likened the continued thrust for Hindi to an authoritarian attempt at turning all other language-speaking communities into bonded labourers of Hindi. Tamil Nadu, he maintained, is not a bobblehead toy and said the Union Home Minister's call betrays the political duplicity of the BJP leadership. “When they land here, it is a honey-coated eulogy of Tamil as the most ancient tongue, but it turns into poison when in Delhi,” he charged.
Tamil Nadu has a long history of massive protests against the imposition of Hindi as early as in 1935. And, it was the 1965 agitation, initially spearheaded by students, that was instrumental in catapulting the DMK to power. In countering the argument that Hindi is spoken by the majority, DMK founder and former Chief Minister CN Annadurai had quipped that in that case the common crow and not the peacock should be the national bird. Both the DMK and the AIADMK are wedded to the two-language formula of the mother tongue and English. No wonder any move to impose Hindi faces resistance in the state.
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Not to be left behind, the Chief Minister's son and Sports Minister Udhayanidhi also joined the issue with Shah, taking offence at the regional languages being demoted as 'local languages'. In a Twitter post, he said, “We will never accept Hindi, whether it comes aggressively or with a cloak of peace. In a pluralistic country with many languages, races and religions, the Union government should stop imposing one country, one religion and one language.”
Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK), which still remains a constituent of the BJP-led NDA, and CPI (M) Lok Sabha MP, Su Venkatesan have also condemned the Union government's push for Hindi. “There is no question of accepting Hindi. Indian languages will not bow down before Hindi. Tamil Nadu has always won against Hindi imposition,” said the Marxist parliamentarian, also a Sahitya Akademi awardee. PMK founder S Ramadoss said, “Tamil Nadu and other non-Hindi speaking states are not craving for Hindi. Amit Shah's assertion that Hindi is not competing with other languages, if true, all the languages in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution should be made official languages of the Union.”
