India is a secular,democratic union of states with many religions,languages and cultures.Everyone of us knows this but are we doing enough to preserve this diversity?
To state the facts,
There is no single National language in India.People within and outside India have believed that Hindi is India's National language,thanks to the media and educational system which has shown it that way.
There are 22 National languages in India as defined in the constitution and all the languages are treated equally.
Now,how does this misconception "Hindi is our National language" affect us?
Apart from the government imposing Hindi across the country by various means(even allocating Rs.360 million every year to spread its use),now general public(Indians) has come to equate Indian nationality with the knowledge of Hindi.A person who does not know Hindi or who does not want Hindi to replace his mother language is considered less Indian and anti National.
People moving across states expect everyone to deal with them in Hindi and never make an attempt to learn the local language even if they decide to settle down in that place.Just imagine this happening for a generation and we are left with only Hindi as the language in India(one of the languages AKa-Bo spoken in Andaman Islands is already extinct as of 2010)
If there is a proposal asking people to learn the local language of a state - why is there opposition to this?
Should the locals learn a new language to deal with the migrants or is it the other way?
Will the Britons learn Gujarati because many Gujaratis have moved there? And Canadians learn Punjabi because there are many Punjabis?
The biggest arguement the people who support One Nation,one Language(hindi) theory make is that it makes it easy as a country if there is one single language.
Let me give you an analogy to this.
There are many religions being followed in India - Hinduism,Jainism,Sikhism,Christianity and Islam.
Just because Hindus are more in number, Should the government propogate that everyone else convert to Hindusim?
So that there would be no problems between people of different religions? Sounds dumb correct?
Then why should one language be given a special consideration than others?
End of the day,we should remember that India is a union of states speaking different languages and following different cultures.
Let us preserve this diversity which has a history of 1000's of years.
Opposition to Hindi Imposition is not to be taken as a hatred toward Hindi as a language or the Hindi speaking people.
It is more a concern for the regional languages and Kannada for me.
We were,and will be united as a country with all our diversity.
we do not need one language,one religion to be united.
