Language: Bridge Or Divide?
On April 17 this year, the President accepted the recommendations of the Parliamentary Committee on Official Language, giving a significant push to the use of Hindi in public discourse. The move has yet again invoked the ire of the non-Hindi speaking population of India, with the DMK threatening a replay of the anti-Hindi protests in Tamil Nadu in the 1960s. Another facet of this language debate is the deep Hindi-English class divide. On this edition of We The People, we ask: Is Hindi spoken widely enough to be the 'national' language of India? Is the Hindi push counter-productive to the organic growth of the language? Is the knowledge of only regional languages disadvantageous?
