Need to increase acceptance of Hindi without competing with other languages, says Amit Shah

PTI, Sep 10, 2024, 9:04 AM IST

New Delhi: Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Monday said there is a need to increase the acceptance of Hindi in the country without competing with any other Indian language.

Addressing the newly constituted Parliamentary Committee on Official Language, Shah also said that in the new education policy brought by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, emphasis has been given for imparting primary education in the mother tongue as children get connected with many languages when they get basic education in mother tongue.

According to an official statement, Shah said “without competing with any Indian language, we need to increase the acceptance of Hindi”. He said Hindi is now in a way associated with employment and technology, and the government of India is also making special efforts to integrate all the new age technologies with the Hindi language.

He said in the new education policy, a resolution has been taken to give importance to all Indian languages and the parliamentary committee will take it much further. The home minister said in the last 10 years, after Modi became the Prime Minister, the parliamentary committee has continuously tried that Hindi becomes a friend of all local languages and it does not compete with anyone.

“We should take care that the speakers of any local language do not have an inferiority complex and Hindi should be generally accepted as the language of work with consensus and agreement,” he said.

Shah underlined that after 75 years of Independence, it is very important that the country is governed in the language of the country and efforts have to be made in this regard. He said by giving new life to a language that is thousands of years old and increasing its acceptance, everyone must fulfil the dream of the visionaries of the freedom movement. Freedom fighters like Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, Lokmanya Tilak, Mahatma Gandhi, Lala Lajpat Rai, C Rajagopalachari, KM Munshi and Sardar Patel came from the non-Hindi speaking states but all of them had realised that the country should have a language which works as a medium of communication between two states, he said.

The home minister said for the last 75 years, efforts have been made to promote the official language Hindi, but in the last 10 years there has been a slight change in its method.

He said former Union ministers KM Munshi and NG Ayyangar had decided after consultation with many people that in order to accept Hindi as the official language and to promote it in government work, Hindi should not compete with any local language. Under the Munshi-Ayyangar Committee, one thing was decided that a language commission would be formed every five years which would consider linguistic diversity, but it was forgotten, he said. Shah said the Department of Official Language is developing a software that will automatically translate all the languages of the 8th Schedule on a technical basis.

Once this work is completed, Hindi will gain acceptance and evolve in the work at a very fast pace, he said. In the last five years, “we have worked very hard and have given three large volumes of the committee’s report to the President, which has never happened before”, he added. The home minister said initiatives have to be taken to achieve a goal that on Independence Day in 2047, the country’s entire work will be done in Indian languages with pride. He said a new life has to be given to the 1,000-year-old Hindi language, make it accepted and try to complete the task left behind by the freedom fighters.

Shah said this is the 75th year since Hindi was accepted as the official language and on this occasion a very big conference is being organised at Bharat Mandapam in Delhi. The Parliamentary Committee on Official Language was constituted under the provisions of Section 4 of the Official Languages Act, 1963, in 1976. The committee comprises 30 members of Parliament, out of which 20 are from the Lok Sabha and 10 from the Rajya Sabha. Shah has served as the chairperson of the committee from 2019 to 2024. He was unanimously re-elected as the chairperson of the committee on Monday.