By Vikram Kilpady
The fear of the law is a healthy feature in a democracy and keeps the semblance of normality intact. The fear derives from the idea that one will be held accountable for a crime or violation of the law and be punished for it, be it a violent crime, or an innocuous one like driving on the wrong side of the road.
There is another sort of fear the law can hold, particularly in India, and that is the language itself. While the Constitution and statute books are written in English, the language is spoken by only around 10% of the country’s inhabitants. The inability of the overwhelming majority to comprehend what the text says and how it says it is a real and widespread hurdle.
Comprehending what the law says is important for most of us and especially for lawyers and those earning their bread and butter from it. Recently, Chief Justice of India (CJI) DY Chandrachud pushed for legal education in regional languages, primarily to spread knowledge of legal concepts among citizens in a language they understand.
Hosting Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the inauguration of the National Conference of the District Judiciary in Delhi, the CJI said new lawyers will be well equipped to argue before the courts in their mother tongue and promote the cause of justice. He has made similar statements over the last year. Justice NV Ramana, the former CJI, and Justice UU Lalit, also a former CJI, had also said that regional languages must be integrated into the court system. The efforts of all three have been to make justice accessible to the poor and the marginalised. The drive to promote the use of regional languages, however, is not to speed up or directly better the system, but to increase its accessibility so that more people can understand it.
At the inauguration of the Dr Rajendra Prasad National Law University, Prayagraj, in February this year, the CJI had noted internships and moot courts were conventionally designed to favour students who belonged to elite and English-speaking backgrounds. He said data from five National Law Universities revealed the composition of law schools in terms of region, gender and the premium attached to fluency in the English language. He noted that a stigma among students about a lack of knowledge of English was acting as a hindrance to the full participation and assimilation of many coming from diverse backgrounds.
At another event in July, this time in Lucknow, the CJI said he was not blaming anyone or suggesting that English should be removed from legal education, but was only suggesting that regional languages should also be adopted in it. The CJI said: “Laws related to regional issues should also be taught in our universities. Suppose a person comes from a village to the university or to the university’s legal aid centre and shares his land-related problem. If the student does not know the meaning of Khasra (land record) and Khatauni (land record document), how will the student be able to help that person?”
The push for education in regional languages or mother tongues has been the main thrust of the National Education Policy, 2020. The assumption is that people would learn better in their mother tongues, which is true in most cases, though exceptions remain.
The then law minister Kiren Rijiju told the Lok Sabha in a written reply on December 9, 2022: “The Department of Higher Education has informed that the National Education Policy, 2020 in its para 20.4 stated that ‘legal education needs to be competitive globally, adopting best practices and embracing new technologies for wider access to and timely delivery of justice. At the same time, it must be informed and illuminated with constitutional values of justice—social, economic, and political and directed towards national reconstruction through instrumentation of democracy, rule of law, and human rights. The curricula for legal studies must reflect socio-cultural contexts along with, in an evidence-based manner, the history of legal thinking, principles of justice, the practice of jurisprudence, and other related content appropriately and adequately. State institutions offering law education must consider offering bilingual education for future lawyers and judges in English and in the language of the State in which the Institution is situated’.”
People who speak more than a few languages are called polyglots. Former Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao was one. The inscrutable Rao was a linguist who also knew how to use silence as a language. Many people say speaking a language is like inhabiting its culture, which may be true.
The centre has been keen to use regional language since 2014. Recently, Rashtrapati Bhavan finished renaming its halls, the need for which arose after the erstwhile Mughal Gardens was renamed as Amrit Udyan.
The reasons for the aggressive push towards regional languages and their role in legal education possibly lie elsewhere. Teaching a subject as clear-cut and defined as law in English seems to have become a problem because English proficiency has diminished over time. With millions of passouts from schools arriving with their own versions of what English entails, the demand for regional languages as medium of instruction has only strengthened.
Further, comprehension as a measure of success is alien to classrooms in India where rote learning is a sure-shot way to success. Without comprehension, how would law students link what they are being taught to the world outside the classroom?
The further lack of interest in reading in the Millennial, Gen Z generations, courtesy the internet, social media, smartphones and an increasing consumption of videos, has killed the curious cat which satisfaction can’t bring back from the dead.
There’s another aspect to this transition for regional languages to succeed. The number of students seeking admission into a legal course should have the same proficiency in languages. But for this, they need to be taught in the same language from Class 1 to Class 12.
In a country where admission into an English medium school is like winning a lottery for people speaking another language at home and elsewhere, the death of the English medium school is far from the horizon.
The positives of teaching in regional languages are many, once the state can identify experts to translate the curriculum in that language. Or artificial intelligence can do it in a jiffy, under human supervision. But the exercise should not end up alienating students who are unable to comprehend what is written in the regional language itself.
A perusal of the Hindi complaint form of the Delhi Police is enough to understand the need for one in a regional language. The form is an Urdu-glazed Hindi weighted by the need to sound formal and solemn. This holds true in almost all Indian languages.
At the valedictory session of the event, President Droupadi Murmu asked if we could think of a justice system at the local level equivalent to municipalities and panchayats. She said making arrangements to provide justice in local languages and local conditions can help in achieving the ideal of taking justice to everyone’s doorstep.
The main grouse of people advocating regional languages for legal education is primarily that the English used is difficult to understand for most students. But one must note that the politically incorrect, yet simpler, thing to do is to simplify the English curriculum.
This is a thought that must be considered before fixing something that is essentially not broken: there are many versions of the Bible, right from the archaic to the easy to read with many other editions between them. If the word of God can be broken down and simplified, why can’t the words and laws thought up by humankind be dealt with in the same manner? Just simplify it. Go with regional languages also, but not with sink-or-swim conditions.