Indian leaders need to see with fresh eyes their nation's beautiful diversity, writes Joseph D’Souza, They ought to strengthen the global progress India has achieved and leave the choice of the language of education to the people.
If this were not enough, India is now facing the specter of even greater division as the president considers a recommendation to make Hindi the official language of instruction in institutions of higher education across the entire nation. This kind of revisionism would be no help to a growing and developing India.
The Indian constitution already accepts Hindi as a national language, but only about 300 million Indians in a nation of 1.3 billion speak Hindi as their mother tongue. Groups in non-Hindi states are already pushing for their state languages to be declared national languages. Accepting the mother tongue of all Indian states as national languages would do justice to India’s diverse cultures.
One agenda appears to keep the majority of lower castes and Dalits out of the power equation and backward in education by keeping their children out of English-language medium schools. This could cause fissures even in the northern regions because those castes want their children to have an English education for the sake of opportunity and equality. The more prosperous South India is fiercely contesting this new education policy direction.
Access to English has given our Indian offspring an edge in global markets. This success has led China to invest billions of dollars to educate Chinese students in English. And yet even China can’t get it right, with its wild plan to homogenize a single Chinese language for an entire nation of vast variations of their native tongue.
Consider what would happen educationally if a prestigious Indian institute of technology in North India provided education only in Hindi. Consider what such a move would mean culturally to Southern Indian states that have resisted the imposition of Hindi over their native Tamil. How does the Tamilian student compete for admission to a Hindi higher learning institute?
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