Page 28 - EducationWorld March 2022

Expert Comment

Hindi promotion not in the

national interest

RAHUL SINGH

HE NATIONAL EDUCATION POLICY (NEP) ap- The BJP-NDA government's promotion
proved by Parliament in 2020 has been widely
praised. However, it has a major flaw that hasn’t of shuddh Hindi is not in the national
Tbeen adequately addressed, viz its promotion of interest. English is widely spoken in all of
Hindi, while simultaneously disparaging English. The di- India's linguistic states
sastrous — unimplemented and unimplementable — three
language policy, instead of being discarded, has been given
a new lease of life by NEP 2020. (i.e, Hindustani). “But I am inclined to think the ultimate
Indeed, the policy goes further: the Union education
ministry has been tasked to provide undergraduate engi- solution would be the adoption of a script which would
bring us in line with the rest of the world… Perhaps some
neering programmes in Hindi and regional languages, even of our countrymen would gape with horror when they hear
though they are painfully short of the scientific terminology of the adoption of the Roman script, but I would beg them
and literature needed for higher education. In particular, to consider this problem from the scientific and historical
Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), among the few pub- point of view.”
licly-funded institutions of higher learning that are world- However, Hindi fundamentalists would have none of
class, are also targeted in this language madness. The fac- this. The result was that the imposition of Hindi in the south
ulty of the IITs have global exposure and teach in English, led to such a strong anti-Hindi agitation in Tamil Nadu in
the global language of industry and commerce. They are a the 1960s that the nation was on the verge of breaking up.
proud and powerful symbol of India’s unity in diversity. To In Turkey, the great reformer, Kemal Ataturk, decided in
regionalise them would be a disservice to the nation. 1928 that Turkish in the Arabic script, which had been used
Moreover, the BJP/NDA government’s downplaying of
English and promotion of shuddh Hindi (as opposed to the for 1,000 years, should be replaced by the Roman script
(with suitable phonetic requirements for Turkish), as it was
more colloquial and comprehensible Hindustani) is not in much easier to learn. As a result, Turkey’s then abysmal ten
the national interest. Hindustani is by far the most spoken percent literacy rate shot up to 90 percent, on a par with
language in the country. But recent surveys indicate that any developed country.
English is the second most spoken language, and more he example of Indonesia, the fourth most populous
importantly, it’s widely spoken in all of India’s linguistic Tcountry of the world, is even more instructive. An ar-
states, making it the country’s premier link language. chipelago of some 17,000 islands, it hosts 1,300 different
A report of the United District Information System of
Education (UDISE) is telling. It covers 265 million children ethnic groups who communicate in 730 languages. Intel-
ligent Indonesian leaders realised that when they got their
in 1.5 million schools, from the primary to higher secondary independence from the Dutch, the choice of one national
level. It reveals that 26 percent of all children are enrolled language would be problematic. They did something quite
in English-medium schools, though Hindi remains a much remarkable. A body of students got together and decided
bigger medium of instruction. All southern states, except not to choose Javanese, which was spoken by 40 percent of
Karnataka, have more children in English-medium, than in Indonesians, as the national language. Instead, they chose
vernacular schools. Surprisingly, this is even so in Punjab, Malay, later to be called Bahasa Indonesia, which only 4
Haryana and Delhi. percent spoke. Malay was a simple and easy-to-learn lan-
In many English-medium schools, instruction is im- guage, used by traders and sailors. And the students de-
parted in the local language. What this means is that the cided that it would be written in the Roman script.
children want to be taught in English, but they can only do In 1928, a decision to this effect was taken. Over the
so if their teacher instructs them in their mother tongue, years, Bahasa (taken from the Hindi bhasha) in the Ro-
a truly bizarre situation and reality. The parents of these man script has developed into the undisputed lingua franca
children converse with their kids in the vernacular at home, of Indonesia. The other, older languages, with their own
yet are keen that their children become fluent in English as scripts, have continued, but Indonesia hasn’t had a seri-
well. Clearly, English has become an aspirational Indian ous national language problem, whereas India still does.
language, not a colonial one, as the ruling party projects it. Apart from Turkey and Indonesia, several other countries
The BJP has lately been propagating Subhash Chandra
Bose as a national icon, on a par with Gandhi and Sardar including Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Somalia
have also adopted the Roman script, They have no hang-
Patel. It may surprise many to learn that Bose was an ad- ups about a ‘colonial’ script, like the ruling party here does.
vocate of Hindi written in the Roman script. After a trip
to Turkey in 1934, he said: “To promote national unity,
we shall have to develop our lingua franca and a common (Rahul Singh is the former editor of the Reader’s Digest and Indian
script,” while adding that a mix of Hindi and Urdu was best Express)

28 EDUCATIONWORLD MARCH 2022