By Vikram Kilpady
With jobs not materialising in India as fast as the number of candidates seeking employment, lakhs have been left asunder. The situation has become grimmer as the private sector has been highly circumspect in investing in projects. Industrialists who welcome Union budgets with joyous abandon even before the finance minister has finished the speech are, in these uncertain times, very cautious of putting their money where their tweet is. So, the government ends up being the sole benefactor for employment, much like investment, industrial infrastructure and everything else.
Again, only a fixed number of jobs are available and these cannot satisfy every aspirant. But imagine if you were forced to write in a language unfamiliar to you. What chance would you have of clearing the test? It is this fear that caused much anger in Tamil Nadu over a CRPF decision to hold computer based tests (CBT) in English and Hindi only. Further, a component of the test awarding 25 marks for basic Hindi comprehension was also cause for worry as it automatically ruled out those who hadn’t learned Hindi.
Like in Tamil Nadu. In the state government syllabus, which has Tamil as the medium of instruction, Hindi features in very few schools, mostly as a third language option. The same prevails in English-medium schools that use the state syllabus.
It is no wonder that Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam wrote to Home Minister Amit Shah, under whose ministry the CRPF functions, on April 9 to allow the tests to be written in other regional languages. Though the CRPF put out a statement that it had never held exams in any other language, political parties maintained that the option to write in Tamil had always existed prior to the notification.
As luck would have it, within a week of Stalin’s letter to Shah, the Home Ministry announced that all Central Armed Police Forces (CAPF) exams would be held in 13 languages apart from Hindi and English, effective 2024. This brought great relief for everyone, including Stalin, although it did not specify if the CRPF test would continue to be a solely English-Hindi affair.
The CRPF notification was for 9,212 constable jobs across the country, of which 579 were to be filled in Tamil Nadu. In the short-term, it looks like knowing Hindi is the only way out. India’s former colonial masters had bequeathed it a system that prohibited constables from being deployed in the same area as their locality of origin. This is why Tamil soldiers in the Army and other paramilitary forces are often posted to Kashmir and other hotspots in north India. This is also why constables from Maharashtra and UP manned police operations in Tamil Nadu’s Ramanathapuram, for instance, during the Sri Lankan Tamil refugee crisis of the mid-1980s.
In the process, each paramilitary force ends up believing it has been stereotyped. In the South, the CRPF is seen as a force with an overwhelming number of north Indians. Conversely, the Central Industrial Security Force, which is deployed in the Delhi Metro, is seen as an outfit with a high concentration of south Indians. This thus is the modern Indian State, continuing to perpetuate the same stereotypes as held sway under foreign rule, three quarters of a century ago.
Divisions along language lines in India have been sleeper cells in the toolkit of disaffection. The creation of states on a linguistic basis ensured a language micro-nationalism would continue to thrive in the face of caste, and now religious, divides. India has seen caste wars and indeed pogroms, with the citizenry donning riot-gear in pursuit of objectivity and both-sideism.
The Eighth Schedule of the Constitution recognises 22 languages as official languages, including Hindi, according no special pre-eminence to any. The narrative that Hindi is the only national language is therefore as original as a WhatsApp forward, but is treated as a fact by many people, particularly in the north of the Vindhyas.
Attempts to impose Hindi on the South have faced stiff opposition ever since 1965 and earlier. This is not to say that people in Tamil Nadu don’t want to learn Hindi, but the fear of being displaced by those speaking another language is real. It has been surgically applied in Tibet, with the Han Chinese displacement of Tibet’s original inhabitants. A similar displacement had been done in the erstwhile Soviet Union by the Russian speaking vanguard, the effects of which are still visible in former republics of the USSR, including the enclaves claimed by Russia in the Ukraine war.
In Tamil Nadu, the DMK has shone like the rising sun, its electoral symbol, in the aftermath of the attempt to spread Hindi post-1965, as per the constitutional provision made in Article 343. The anti-Hindi agitation was the political crucible that took the mickey out of the Congress here, leaving it a spent force in the state. A further split in the DMK led to the creation of the Anna DMK, the precursor to the AIADMK, which found willing support among disaffected former Congress workers. Unlike the DMK, the Anna DMK was a vehicle only for MG Ramachandran (MGR), the Tamil film star, whose rise mirrored that of the DMK. MGR’s crowd-pulling capacity ensured the DMK got its five minutes of fame with the voter, but the party leadership, read Karunanidhi, was unwilling to share leadership space with MGR, and hence the split.
The Tamil language occupies centrestage in the DMK scheme of things. Any move to nudge it off the centre will invite swift repercussions, which is where everything starts to go wrong for people unfamiliar with the state’s troubled relationship with Hindi.
Given the centrality of Tamil, a central police force job, however, is not something to be ignored. There are many in Tamil Nadu who have picked up Hindi through the Dakshin Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha, despite the official cold shoulder to it in the pre-internet years. The decades since the 1990s have seen Bollywood-led Hindi incursions into Tamil mindspace, sometimes via the music of AR Rahman.
In the run-up to 2024, the desire to push Hindi is also an attempt to needle Tamil Nadu into a greater engagement with the BJP, whose local unit has been inept at reaching out to people in the state. This is why its current leadership has left no opportunity to speak up for Tamil. Nonetheless, controversy erupted when the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) put out a notification saying curd would be sold with the Hindi word Dahi written on it. That was enough to decry the next attempt to reimpose Hindi in the state. The BJP Tamil Nadu leadership protested on Twitter before taking it up with the centre. Better sense prevailed, the FSSAI modified its order to allow the use of the words Thayir (curd in Tamil), Mosaru (curd in Kannada) and Perugu (curd in Telugu).
With elections to Karnataka drawing near, Hindi imposition fears also made good copy in the campaign playbook. A quote of Amit Shah on Amul, the milk major based in Anand, Gujarat, extending its expertise to the Karnataka Milk Federation saw Congress leaders in Karnataka zooming in for the kill. They made it an Amul vs Nandini (the local milk brand) battle, a euphemism intending to portray a regional conflict between Gujarat and Karnataka.
The Amul vs Nandini brand battle polarised people so much that even former Congress president Rahul Gandhi had to tweet his appreciation for Nandini as video footage emerged of him wolfing down a Nandini icecream cone while passing on more cones to other party leaders.
Language chauvinism has not been a Congress plank in Karnataka; there are other groups whose militant activism ensured every company and shopfront had signs both in Kannada and English. The chauvinism also explodes onto the streets of Bengaluru whenever the Cauvery dispute flashes in the media; this chauvinism is usually anti-Tamil.
In March this year, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy tweeted his joy at RRR’s Naatu, Naatu winning the Best Song at the Oscars. He tweeted: “The #Telugu flag is flying higher!” Little did the chief minister know that several people, and not just unidentifiable trolls and bots, will take offence at his seeing it as first a Telugu song, and not as an Indian song.
The Home Ministry’s decision to hold recruitment exams in 13 languages, apart from Hindi and English, can be claimed by Stalin as his achievement. But as the DMK chief has clearly no aspiration at the national level and has been a Congress-Rahul Gandhi supporter, which is like saying no Opposition effort for 2024 would be complete without the Congress, language will continue to be a vulnerable target.
—The writer is Editor, IndiaLegalLive.com and APNLive.com