Only Hindi in the ranks?

Imagine a middle-class Tamil person in Chennai. He is a citizen of the Indian Union. He has always wanted to defend his homeland from external aggression. He wants to join the Army when he grows up. He studies in a government school like the majority does in Tamil Nadu. He is not from a poor family, so he aspires to go to the National Defence Academy (NDA) to become an officer in the Indian Army. He thinks that as a Tamil man and an Indian citizen, he can serve well in the army. Then, before the exam, he comes to know that his mother tongue and medium of schooling, Tamil, is not allowed in the NDA entrance examination. He can’t write the exam in his mother tongue. He can’t even get the NDA entrance exam syllabus in his mother tongue.  He wonders: why does he have this disadvantage? Then he thinks, “Maybe everyone has this disadvantage, that no one gets to sit in that exam in their mother tongue.” His Hindi-speaking neighbour studying in a CBSE school informs him that he can sit in the same NDA examination in his mother tongue, Hindi. Now, our Tamil boy is confused. He had assumed all along that citizenship confers total equality of status and as C.N. Annadurai - the legendary Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu and stalwart of the Dravidian movement and anti-Hindi agitation in Tamil Nadu - had said, every citizen must share advantages and disadvantages equally. He also comes to know that the NDA exam has Mathematics and General Knowledge components. He doesn’t understand how Hindi helps in mastering Mathematics and General Knowledge in ways that Tamil doesn’t. He has heard that Hindi speakers are over-represented among officers in the Indian Army. May be it’s a rumour? But then this ‘Hindi OK, Tamil not OK’ rule make him think again. It also makes him think deeper about things beyond NDA, like issues of equal citizenship. He feels cheated and discriminated aginst but there is no recourse. Is knowledge and patriotism not enough for a Tamil to get the same treatment as a UP inhabitant with the same amount of knowledge and patriotism? He had tried to maintain good health so that he passes the physical exam for getting into the Army. He wasn’t even allowed to take the exam in his mother tongue. The physical exam became irrelevant. Language became the decider.

Earlier this August, about half the candidates who wanted to join the Indian Army from Tamil Nadu were disqualified

Another young man from Tamil Nadu studied in English-medium educational systems and cracked the NDA. And after joining the Academy, he is tested again for various subjects, including Hindi! He has no knowledge of Hindi but his Hindi-speaking batch mates have a cakewalk. He thought fitness, knowledge and patriotism were enough for an Army officer. Now he comes to know that Hindi knowledge is so important that even the NDA tests you for it. When does the discrimination end?

Earlier this August, about half the candidates who wanted to join as soldiers in the Indian Army from Tamil Nadu were disqualified. They had successfully cleared the extremely difficult Physical Fitness Test (PFT) but were stumped by the absence of Tamil question papers, which were obviously made available in Hindi and English. Thus even at the soldier’s level, people whose mother tongue is Hindi can expect to be tested in their mother-tongue. Everyone else is a second-class citizen. Also, the exam was set in the Union government-controlled Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) syllabus, where less than 10% of students in the Indian Union study. Tamil Nadu state board students never knew that to be considered a full citizen who has all the rights of citizenship, one had better be at a CBSE school, studying Hindi. Tamils have to discard their Tamil-ness to become Indian. Hindi defines what others must change into, in order to be Indian.

Have a look at Indian Union’s map. Over 90% of the land border is in non-Hindi states. The entire coastal border is in non-Hindi states. Is this Hindi business some kind of cruel, discriminatory joke to retain the unscientific and racist Martial Race theory of the British, which even the Army recently defended in court? After the Tamil Nadu recruitment event where nearly half the Tamil-medium applicants were disqualified, sources at the Indian Army Recruiting Office said, “We lose some of the best candidates and sports talents” due to the anti Tamil discrimination policy. A report in The Hindu says, “some of the best candidates in terms of physical fitness and talents in sports were missed out as they found the written examination tough in the absence of regional language option. These candidates could probably clear the test had it been conducted in Tamil, the sources said”. What does the Army want: the best person or the best Hindi-speaking person? By upholding a preferential policy for Hindi even when the best talent is being lost to the Army, isn’t external security being put at stake?

The government of India, in pursuance of its Hindi imposition policy wants to peddle the idea that Hindi is the national language - it is not, as clarified multiple times by courts – and that Hindi has some kind of universal acceptance. Extensive studies show that a large majority of Indian citizens don’t understand Hindi and Hindi is the mother tongue of a mere 25% of the people, which also includes separate languages deliberately misclassified as Hindi dialects to bloat up Hindi’s numbers. Maybe the Government of India wants to repeat the lie of Hindi’s universal intelligibility and acceptance and concomitantly discriminate against non-Hindi speakers so that with time, this Hindi imposition and non-Hindi exclusion programme finally produces what it claims is already present. There are other names for such a policy. It is called cultural apartheid or linguistic genocide.

Garga Chatterjee is a Kolkata-based commentator on South Asian politics and culture. He received his PhD from Harvard and is a member of faculty at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. He blogs at hajarduari.wordpress.com