The bloody history

It’s the human imperative to fight over something. We can’t get out of bed in the morning unless there’s a fight to inspire us. India chooses communalism.

Tensions are rising in India over prime minister Narendra Modi’s push to make Hindi the country’s dominant language.

Modi’s Bharatiya Janaya party (BJP) government has been accused of an agenda of “Hindi imposition” and “Hindi imperialism” and non-Hindi speaking states in south and east India have been fighting back.

Of course with Modi and the BJP it’s not just Hindi, it’s also Hindu – it’s not just the language, it’s also the religion and all the baggage that goes with it.

Modi’s speeches are given exclusively in Hindi and over 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.

That’s a big “if” though. It’s entirely possible that there is no one language that can do that. Furthermore, if there were, it could be that only the foreign one would work. English might work the way Latin did in Europe for many centuries: it was no one’s natal language, so it was neutral.

The debate over Hindi’s prominence has raged since before India’s independence. Though there are more Hindi speakers than those of any other native language in India, they are largely concentrated in the populous, politically powerful states in the north known as the Hindi belt. Hindi traditionally has very little presence in southern states such as Tamil-speaking Tamil Nadu and Kannada-speaking Kerala, and eastern states such as West Bengal, home to 78 million Bengali speakers.

“Under Modi, language has become a heavily politicised issue,” said Papia Sen Gupta, a professor in the Centre for Political Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. “The narrative being projected is that India must be reimagined as Hindu state and that in order to be a true Hindu and a true Indian, you must speak Hindi. They are becoming more and more successful in implementing it.”

Hey I have an idea: why not partition the true Hindu section of India off from the rest of it? That went so well the last time…

Some have warned of the bloody history that language imposition has triggered in the region. Sri Lanka descended into 26-year civil war after Sinhalese nationalists tried to foist their language on the island’s minority Tamils, and it was the oppression of the Bengali language in east Pakistan that led to the 1971 war and the establishment of Bangladesh.

Let’s go to war over language! No let’s go to war over religion! Let’s do both! No let’s do first one and then the other!

In response to the policies seen to promote Hindi, multiple nationalist language movements have now emerged across India, from Rajasthan to West Bengal. In West Bengal, where the Bengali language is seen as a very fundamental part of people’s cultural identity, there has been a growing Bengali nationalist movement over the past two years.

Nationalism begets more nationalism. Anything for a fight, eh?

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