Modi's Bharatiya Janaya party (BJP) government has been accused of being an agenda of "Hindi imposition" and "Hindi imperialism", and non-Hindi speaking states in south and east India have been fighting back.
One morning in November, MV Thangavel, an 85-year-old farmer from the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, stood outside a local political party office and held a banner aloft, addressing the prime minister.
"Modi government, central government, we don't want Hindi ... get rid of Hindi," it read. Then he doused himself in paraffin and set himself alight. Thangavel did not survive.
"The BJP is trying to destroy other languages by trying to impose Hindi and make it one language on the basis of its 'One nation, one everything' policy," said MK Stalin, the chief minister of Tamil Nadu, in a recent speech.
In India, one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world, language has long been a contentious issue. But under Modi, there has been a push for Hindi to be the country's dominant language, be it through an attempt to impose mandatory Hindi in schools or by conducting matters of government entirely in the language. Modi's speeches are given exclusively in Hindi and more than 70% of cabinet papers are now prepared in Hindi.
"If there is one language that has the ability to string the nation together in unity, it is the Hindi language," said Amit Shah, the powerful home minister and Modi's closest ally, in 2019.
According to Ganesh Narayan Devy, one of India's most renowned linguists, who dedicated his life to recording its more than 700 languages and thousands of dialects, the recent attempts to impose Hindi were both "laughable and dangerous".
This story is from the December 26, 2022 edition of The Guardian.
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This story is from the December 26, 2022 edition of The Guardian.
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