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The suffocation of indigenous-script movements in the Northeast

- MANORANJAN PEGU

On 7 April 2022, the union home minister, Amit Shah, while speaking at a meeting of parliament’s official-language committee, described Hindi as “the language of India.” He said that Hindi, an official language, should become an “important part of the unity of the country.” When speakers of different languages in India converse with each other, he added, “it should be in the language of India” and, in keeping with this spirit, Prime Minister Narendra Modi used Hindi for running the government. Shah suggested that Hindi, rather than indigenous languages, should take the place of English. He announced that all eight north-eastern states had agreed to make Hindi compulsory up to the tenth standard and had recruited over twenty thousand Hindi teachers.

This was not the first time that the home minister had announced the government’s intention to impose Hindi upon those who do not speak the language. “Every language has its own importance, but it is very important to have a language of the whole country which should become the identity of India globally,” Shah said on the Hindi Divas in 2019. “Today, if a language can keep the country united, it is the spoken language, Hindi.” That year, the Modi government also pushed for Hindi to become compulsory as part of its draft National Education Policy, eventually dropping the clause after massive protests.