Congress to oppose Hindi 'imposition' on non-Hindi speaking states

New Delhi, April 16: The Congress is gearing up to oppose any move to implement Hindi in the non-speaking states after a controversy erupted since Union Home Minister Amit Shah said that Hindi should be accepted as an alternative language to English.

The Congress said that the BJP is testing the waters by creating an issue and promoting division in the country but the party will oppose any such move when the government enforces it. Congress Leader of Opposition in the Karnataka Legislative Council B K Hariprasad told IANS: "It's not an easy thing as the non-Hindi speaking states will not accept it and we will oppose any such move. However I speak Hindi, but people will not accept this, the government should see the history, see what had happened before on the issue."

Union Home Minister Amit Shah, presiding over the 37th meeting of the Parliamentary Official Language Committee, had said unless we make Hindi flexible by accepting words from other local languages, it will not be propagated.

He informed the members that now 70 per cent of the agenda of the Cabinet is prepared in Hindi and over 22,000 Hindi teachers have been recruited in the eight states of the North East. The nine tribal communities of the North East have converted their dialects' scripts to Devanagari while all the eight states have agreed to make Hindi compulsory in schools up to Class 10.

The BJP too knows the implications and its Tamil Nadu unit has said that there is no move to implement any language forcefully.

Congress leader Jairam Ramesh has alleged that this is language imperialism.

"Hindi is Raj Bhasha, not Rashtra Bhasha, as Rajnath Singh said in Parliament when he was HM. Hindi imperialism will be the death knell for India. I'm very comfortable with Hindi, but I don't want it rammed down anybody's throat. Amit Shah is doing a disservice to Hindi by imposing it," he had tweeted.

Amit Shah had emphasised that there is a need to give elementary knowledge of Hindi to students up to Class nine and to pay more attention to Hindi teaching exams.

The Home Minister said that after meeting all the concerned Secretaries, an Implementation Committee should be constituted to review the progress of implementing the recommendations of the 1st to 11th volumes of the Official Language Committee report.

He added that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has decided that the medium of running the government is the Official Language and this will definitely increase the importance of Hindi.

Congress ally DMK too has opposed it vehemently. 'Murasoli', the mouthpiece of the party, said that party patriarch and former Chief Minister, the late M. Karunanidhi, had, as a 14-year-old student, marched across the streets of Tirupattur against the then Central government's move to impose Hindi on the people of the state.

The people of Tamil Nadu have still not forgotten the rally taken out by Karunanidhi against Hindi, it said, adding: "Do not forget it". In a direct call to the people of Tamil Nadu to strongly oppose the imposition of Hindi, the article asserted that there were no cowards in the state and that Hindi cannot be imposed on them.

Karunanidhi's son and present Chief Minister, M.K. Stalin has strongly come out against the Union Home Minister's statement, saying that it would destroy national integration.