Garga Chatterjee In the Indian Union, the emerging politics of federalism to be successful has to represent the discontent that is being created by the centralizing tendencies of the Union government led by the BJP. Hindi-Hindi-Hindustan are the three lines of its assault. The resistance from federalists has to be towards this entire package. It seems like the early rumblings of this kind are already happening. While Hindi imposition by the Union government is as old as the Indian Union itself, there has been a certain ominous desperation in the speed and breadth of Hindi imposition under the current Union government. While Hindi imposition by Union government has happening with a quickened pace since Narendra Modi's ascent to power, it also led to a growing unease about significant section of the non Hindi populace of the Indian Union. Most recently, the Presidential stamp of approval on a slew of Hindi language imposition and promotion measures recommended by a parliamentary Official language committee have now created the situation of a political show-down around the issue of forced homogeneity in the incredibly diverse political entity called the Indian Union. The Hindi imposition question is not new. In 1965, more than 200 Tamils were martyred by primarily central forces when they protested forced Hindi imposition. Since then, Tamil Nadu has been looked upon as the odd one out, a thorn in the beautiful path of linguistic uniformity via Hindi. This formulation was convenient because by portraying Tamil Nadu as an outlier, it implied that the rest were on board. It is this false portrayal of opposition to Hindi imposition being a Tamil issue that now has been shred into pieces. Strong voices, both from political field and from civil society, have arisen from many non-Hindi states, including multiple non Dravidian states. West Bengal's Bengali speaking MP from Trinamool Saugata Roy, DMK's Tamil speaking leader M.K. Stalin, Janata Dal (Secular)'s Kannada speaking leader H.D. Kumaraswamy, Lok Satta's Telugu speaking leader Jayaprakash Narayan and many more have spoken out against Hindi imposition in the last one month. Newspapers as varied as Delhi headquartered English daily Indian Express to the Bengaluru headquartered Kannada daily Vijaya Karnataka have run editorials against Hindi imposition and promotion moves that were approved by President. In the past week, civil society and social media protests against Hindi imposition have happened in Odisha, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and elsewhere and have received significant media coverage. Of late Twitter hashtags like #StopHindiImposition, #StopHindiChauvinism and #StopHindiImperialism have been extremely popular. None of these originated in Tamil Nadu. It is no longer Tamil Nadu versus the rest. Far from being a source of disunity, the Hindi imposition protests have united many Indian citizens across linguistic boundaries. It is now Hindi versus non-Hindi in a non-Hindi majority Indian Union. The long list of recommendations effectively impose Hindi on non-Hindi people and do so through taxes and revenues extracted from non Hindi people. Thus, non-Hindi people are paying for their own chains of slavery to Hindi. The extensive set of recommendations has an underlying ideology. It wants to beat a multi-lingual union into a monolingual entity. The underlying reason is “unity”. Thus, diversity is looked upon as a threat. No wonder, the Official Languages department is under the Home Ministry and reveals exactly the mindset from which the Indian deep-state operates. The recommendations favour Hindi speakers for jobs, create hurdles for non-Hindi citizens in almost every walk of life which has anything to do with the Union government- effectively making them second class citizens of the Indian Union. Incentivizing Hindi and disincentivizing non-Hindi is all government purposes, discriminating against non-Hindi speakers and favouring Hindi speakers in matters of jobs is precisely what Pakistan practiced before 1947. That led to the upright Bengali people telling Pakistan – keep your Urdu imposition, we shall see to it that a Bengali speaker has exactly the same rights in every aspect as a Urdu speaker. They followed through their promise through the creation of the independent People's Republic of Bangladesh. The Indian Union has no national language precisely because this Union is a union of various linguistic nationalities. To make it a Hindi nation is a threat to the unity of the Indian Union itself, as MK Stalin has presciently pointed out. The political rhetoric of the present Union government vis-a-vis religion and increasingly the ground actions of its supporters is making parts of the Indian Union look like a Hindu mirror image of Islamic Pakistan. Whether by imposing Hindi, it also wants to look like the Hindi mirror image of pre-1971 Urdu Pakistan and hence share Pakistan's subsequent fate is up to the mandarins of the Union government. They have to choose. So will the non-Hindi peoples of the Indian Union.