Democracy: continuities and disruptions

This chapter begins with a note of disclaimer: it is not my intention to suggest that conflict over language, religion and dissent are the only or even the chief fault lines that have recurred over the seventy-five years of independent India. Caste is clearly the most pervasive fault line, closely followed by gender and often intertwined with it. But nationalist mobilization around Hindi, overt as well as tacit support for religious violence, especially against Muslims, and the suppression of dissent became three key tactics of the second republic.

All three issues had arisen under the first republic too. Attempts to tackle them were only partially successful, perhaps because wounds to the psyche heal slowly and not at all when their newly formed scabs are ripped off as they so frequently are in India (see the section on communal riots and inquiry commissions). Yet each attempt left a series of lessons to be learned of what not to do as much as what to do.

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In April 2022, while chairing the thirty-seventh meeting of Parliament’s official language committee in New Delhi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah remarked that ‘the time has come to make the Official Language an important part of the unity of the country’. Seventy per cent of cabinet papers were already prepared in Hindi and the number of Hindi speakers had steadily grown. Hindi was going to be compulsory in schools in the eight north-eastern states, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura.

Shah had been creative with figures, critics pointed out. In the 2011 census, Hindi speakers were reported to be well below 50 per cent of India’s population. Even this was skewed, according to the head of the people’s linguistic survey, G.N. Devy. What seemed to be a rise in the number of Hindi speakers, from just under 37 per cent of the population in 1971 to 43.6 per cent in 2011, was chiefly due to the inclusion of as many as fifty-six dialects as Hindi, some spoken by large enough numbers to qualify for separate recognition, such as Bhojpuri and Rajasthani. By contrast, the 1981 census had grouped forty-eight languages under the Hindi category. If the additions were discounted, those reporting themselves as Hindi speakers might actually have declined to 32 per cent, in the same way that the share of Bengali, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu speakers had shrunk slightly. In fact, the language that showed the highest rate of growth was a regional language/dialect, Bhojpuri.

Predictably, Shah’s comments caused political fallout. Congressman Jairam Ramesh called it ‘Hindi imperialism’. His colleague Shashi Tharoor pointed out that it advantaged ‘one set of Indians over others’ and was ‘a recipe for division over diversity’. In Assam, the state Sahitya Sabha (literary society) issued a statement calling on Shah to ‘develop Assamese and other indigenous languages’, as had been promised by the 1985 Assam Accord. In Manipur, Meitei language and culture groups said that ‘the move to make Hindi language compulsory was aimed at rewriting history’.

Tamil Nadu’s chief minister Stalin said it was an imposition that his party would resist. What the home minister seemed ‘to have overlooked is that English has been recognised as an Indian language as much as Tamil or Telugu or Hindi have’, commented south India’s most influential newspaper The Hindu, referring to English language awards by the national academy of letters, the Sahitya Akademi. Hinglish was recognized in the Oxford English dictionary in 2005. India had done well as one nation with many languages, the Indian Express editorial added. Researchers found further that the states which ranked highest on India’s human development index were those that reported a larger number of English speakers and used English as their link or administrative language.

Half a century earlier, Tamil member of Parliament M. Santosham had similarly protested, ‘The English language has been a weapon in our hands.’ It was ‘with the help of [the] English language’ that Indians had ‘thrown away’ British rule.

Tamil legislators had successfully opposed the adoption of Hindi as the sole national language in the Constituent Assembly and provisional parliament; they were instrumental in the 1952 decision that both English and Hindi would be used as official languages for fifteen years. An attempt to revive a onelanguage policy when the deadline approached met with riots in Tamil Nadu, leading to the decimation of the state Congress branch and enactment of the Official Languages Act in 1967. The act notified both English and Hindi as administrative languages, making it mandatory for the Union to communicate in English with states that had not adopted Hindi as their official language. If the Union administration sent a communication in Hindi to any such state, it had to be accompanied by an English translation. Hindi was adopted as an official language by only nine states and two union territories.

In 2020, the Supreme Court advised the Modi administration to amend the 1967 act to include publication of government notifications in India’s twenty-two officially recognized languages, listed in the eighth schedule to the Constitution. ‘These days, translation is the easiest thing on Earth. We translate judgments, Parliament has instant translation software’, said the bench, headed by then chief justice S.A. Bobde. At the same time, it stayed the Delhi High Court’s 12 August order asking why the Modi administration should not be charged with contempt of court for disobeying a 30 June order to publish the draft rules for environmental impact assessment in regional languages within ten days, rendering its own advice immaterial.

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The question of whether India should have a single national language was controversial from the start. It spanned two widely different goals. The immediate issue was administrative language, but the much larger issue was national integration. In Europe, nation-states such as France and Italy had imposed one language on multilingual or multi-dialect regions as a means of consolidation; linguistic nationalism became a core element of nineteenth-century European state formation. But Indian nationalism took a separate trajectory. Though it carried strands of European nationalism amongst the intelligentsia, its popular form was localized both culturally and linguistically.

(Excerpted with permission from Radha Kumar’s ‘The Republic Relearnt’; published by Penguin Random House)