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– Dr. Deepak Pawar
The following is the excerpts from the speech delivered by Dr. Deepak Pawar, Maharashtra at the Conference to condemn the imposition of Hindi-Sanskrit, organized by Dravidar Kazhagam on 25th August 2017 at Periyar Thidal, Chennai.
Members of the parliament from all the Non Hindi states have this responsibility to tell the parliament and through it to the Indian state that the more they try to push Hindi down the throat of the non Hindi population, the more they would be paving the way for Balkanization of this country.
This conference is against the domination of Hindi and Sanskrit. Tamil Nadu has a long history of the struggle for its language and against the domination of Hindi
This can be seen since the time of the Constituent Assembly.
Representatives of people all over India discussed it thoroughly and finally a compromise formula called Munshi Iyengar formula was adopted.
The demand of the Hindiwallahs that Hindi be the national language was squarely rejected and it had to be confined as the official language of the union.
So India does not have a national language ad if anybody tells u something contrary to this, remind them of the constituent assembly debate.
During the debate, it was suggested that Sanskrit be made the national language, so was Bangla.
The logic behind the suggestion of Sanskrit was that it is an old language from where a number of other languages develop. It was also suggested that if we decide to have Sanskrit as the national language, people from the non Hindi belt will have to learn the language afresh and in that case, learning Sanskrit would not be difficult.
The suggestion was not accepted, but it was decided that while developing terminology for science and technology an attempt would be made to develop it through the help of Sanskrit as far as possible to ensure uniformity.
Languages like Marathi took this quite literally and therefore the terminology developed here is considered to be alien to the Marathi soil to a considerable level.
The message is clear.
If you wish to develop your language in various walks of social life, do not depend on Sanskrit beyond a point.
In fact, look inwards to the various dialects of your language for the development.
This is natural and logical.
Your state has seen anti-Hindi agitation in 1965 when the Government of India decided to change the status quo and declared that Hindi will replace English.
I was in Chennai in 2015 when the golden jubilee celebration of those agitations was organized. We have come a long way from 1965. The department of official language under the Ministry of Home Affairs Government of India is supposed to look after the development and promotion of Hindi.
It is strange that the department is under the ministry of home affairs, because language is not a law and order question.
Secondly, when schedule VIII of the constitution has 22 languages and by the report of the Sitakant Mahapatra committee, more than 35 languages wanting to be in that schedule, it would have been ideal to have a ministry for Indian languages looking after Indian languages.
In the absence of such a fair and inclusive approach, the union government thinks that its only constitutional responsibility is promotion of Hindi.
Members of the parliament from all the Non Hindi states have this responsibility to tell the parliament and through it to the Indian state that the more they try to push Hindi down the throat of the non Hindi population, the more they would be paving the way for Balkanization of this country.
The focus on Hindi has increased after the Hindi -Hindu-Hindustan dispensation coming to power at the Centre.
The focus is on increasing the sphere of influence of Hindi and treating it as a global language. No harm in doing this, if in the same breath they speak of the development of other Indian languages. They are not doing it because they fear that linguistic diversity will destroy the unity and integrity of the country.
Let us set the record straight.
India is a multinational state with various linguistic communities as nationalities. We are actually united states of India. And we will remain united as long as the linguistic identity is not jeopardized.
Having said this, let me say something about what we can proactively do for the development of our language.
The least one could do is to send your children to the mother tongue schools and provide best quality education to children in mother tongue.
We must have a full fledged department of the official language in every state of the country with adequate skilled manpower and funds.
It is only then that we can develop a constructive, deadline based agenda. We have to ensure that we can talk directly with each other without the barrier of an interpretation by the third language. Let us use all our energies for this cherished goal.
I hope that this conference will pave the way for concrete language planning agenda in Tamil Nadu duly followed by other states.
