One Language of a muli-lingual federal republic without a majority language cannot be its face to the world Garga Chatterjee On 23rd June, Indian Union’s Hindi speaking Union Minister for External Affairs Sushma Swaraj announced that from now on, all details in the passport of Indian Union citizens will be also be in Hindi, in addition to English. Already at present, the cover page has Hindi, the registration details are in Hindi, a “Caution” note underneath is in Hindi, a Presidential order printed in the passport is in Hindi, all field names like Type, Country Code, Passport number, Name, Surname, Nationality, Sex, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Place of Issue, Date of Issue, Date of Expiry, Name of Father/Legal Guardian, Name of Mother, Name of Spouse, Address, Old Passport number with Date and Place of Issue and File Number is in Hindi. So what changes? Now the content inside those fields will be in Hindi, in Devanagari script. For example, under the field “Name” and “Surname”, my name and surname will be printed in Hindi in Devanagari script. These details are at present printed only in English. To justify the introduction of Hindi and Hindi only alongwith English, Sushma Swaraj said, “All Arab countries have their passport in Arabic, Germany makes it in German and Russia makes it in Russian. Why can't we make it Hindi?” What Sushma Swaraj cites as examples is clever because the statement makes perfect sense to people in areas from where her party, the BJP, got more than 70% of its seats in the Lok Sabha elections, that is, the Hindi speaking states. However, it does not make sense to the majority of the citizens of the Indian Union who are non-Hindi. Hindi is in fact the mother tongue of less than 30% of Indian Union citizens and that too after many independent languages in the so-called Hindi belt are counted as Hindi dialects even when they are not. Thus, when Sushma Swaraj says “Why can't we make it Hindi?”, the ‘we’ is not Indian Union citizens. This ‘we’ are the Hindi citizens of the Indian Union. It is a shame that she equates that minority with the rest of us, thus completely obliterating the identity or stake the rest of us, the majority, have in any idea of ‘we’. Compared to that less than 30% number that Hindi people constitute, more than 95% people of Germany speak German as their first language, more than 96% people of Russian Federation do so. Thus, when Sushma Swaraj compares Russia or Germany to the Indian Union, she either has in mind, at best, only the Hindustan area of the Indian Union or worst, what she wants the Indian Union to become. Majoritarianism is bad enough. A minority espousing majoritarianism is a delusional recipe for disaster apart from the indignity that such ideologies met out to non-Hindi linguistic nationalities of the Indian Union. What is interesting though from Sushma Swaraj’s cited examples of German in Germany and Russian in Russia is that she understands that it is language that makes a nation. But pushing that simple and obvious understanding in the Indian Union’s case would mean multiple sovereign linguistic nations. And that’s where the brute assertion and imposition of Hindi by the Hindi minority makes its power felt. If Sushma Swaraj had taken her eyes away from these practically monolinguistic nations to nearby Sri Lanka, she would have seen that Tamil along with Sinhalese and English is embossed on the passport cover, even though Sinhala is the mother tongue of 74.9% . Compare this to about 25% in case of Hindi and no presence of any other language. She could have also studied another multi-lingual formation (it’s hard to call these nations) like Switzerland whose passport has 5 languages on the cover ( Switzerland’s population is 8.2 million, Indian Union’s population is 1311 million). Thus, feasibility is not an issue.
Who is complaining? Sushma Swaraj claims that she has received several complaints about the fact that passport field content was in English. She, however, did not clarify or give any details about who these complainants were or what is the mother tongue of these complainants (http://www.news18.com/news/india/passports-to-be-in-both-english-and-hindi-sushma-swaraj-1441857.html ). Still, one should take her statement in face value. Who are these citizens of the Indian Union who complained that they faced problems with an English detail only passport and wanted Hindi to make up for that? What is the likelihood that these were Hindi speakers because I can’t imagine a Tamil or a Bengali who wants his/her name to be in Hindi but not in Tamil or Bangla because s/he has some problem with English. Does it mean, that if non-Hindi citizens of the Indian Union also complain to the Ministry of External Affairs, they shall also get their language in addition to English in their passports because I am assuming that Hindi and non-Hindi citizens of the Indian Union have equal rights of understanding the content of their passport and the Minister of External Affairs represent Hindi people as much as she represents Kannadigas or Bengalis.
In fact, in social media and elsewhere, non-Hindi people have already done so by tweeting her, emailing her ministry and such (https://www.facebook.com/groups/PromoteLinguisticEquality/permalink/1430257057062636/). However, Sushma Swaraj has not responded to these complaints with the same earnestness as she did for complaints that made her Hindify the passport. Since English is internationally understood in immigration checkpoints (the primary spot where a passport is usually ‘read’), it’s unclear how Hindi helps in such spots except for helping Indian Union’s Hindi citizens understand their passport. Why do non-Hindi citizens of the Indian Union not have the right to the same understanding in their mother tongue? Why can’t a Bengali or Odia citizen of the Indian Union choose Bangla or Odia (alongwith internationally understood English) as his/her passport language while applying for it? The technology exists. It is feasible. Denial of equal linguistic rights in the Indian Union and imposing Hindi on non-Hindi peoples is not a technocratic decision. It is a political decision.
Passport paradox Other expressions of this political decision are the repeated assertion by Union Ministers of the BJP that Hindi is “our” national language. But it is not. It never was. But see how it sounds. Super Indian nationalistic, right? Now, if I say, Bengali is my national language, how does it sound? Almost anti national, right? The way these two completely equivalent assertions have come to sound so different is the old project of ethno-cultural flattening called Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan. The Hindi in passport is just the newest expression.
A passport is a brand stuck to a person – it is like ownership not unlike how chattel was branded by owners. The language of branding is the language of the owner, the ruler, the master. In the case of the Indian Union, it is Hindi which is as foreign to non-Hindi people as English is, as the Gujarat High Court has observed. Still, unconstitutional assertions about Hindi being the “national” language continue. This actually points to an apparent paradox that is not so much of a paradox.
World over, nations are linguistic entities. Some of them have sovereign states, some don’t. The Indian Union certifies itself to be a nation. It is surely a sovereign state but not necessarily a nation in the sense Germany or Russia is. It is a union of multiple nations, like the United Kingdom or Spain. This is the reality that Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan nationalists want to obliterate. The continued survival of non-Hindi languages inspite of their absolute marginalization and imposition of Hindi is the biggest obstacle to this political project of cultural and linguistic ethnocide in the service of an imperial vision of Indian nationhood. While non Hindi Indian citizens have not signed up to this project, it does not stop the Union government to mis-represent its diverse polity such that what Russian is to Russia becomes Hindi in case of the Indian Union.
Thus, Hindi Day is observed in Indian consulates all over the world, never Tamil or any other day. Thus, Hindi study classes and scholarships are given to foreign citizens by the Indian consulate – never Bangla or Telugu classes of study scholarships. The Ministry of External Affairs has specific posts for Hindi speakers but not for speaker of any other language. The structural conspiracy is quite deep. This seems to be working outside the Indian Union as more and more heads of state now seem to greet the Indian Union’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Hindi on social media (http://www.ndtv.com/offbeat/dutch-pm-mark-rutte-tweets-pm-narendra-modi-in-hindi-leaves-the-internet-confused-1717762?pfrom=home-topstories).
Hindi can never represent me in any way or be my face to the world or anyone or anything. I am a Bengali citizen of the Indian Union. My Bengali ancestors of West Bengal chose to join the Indian Union republic with a certain obvious understanding – that was the guarantee of equal opportunity for all linguistic backgrounds and no special favours or discrimination towards any specific language. New Delhi has broken that agreement right from 1947. Since 2014, the pace of that process has taken the form of a deluge that aims to obliterate the plural character of the Union. New Delhi is breaking its part of the deal and pushing the envelope on Hindi hegemony. In reaction, forces are being unleashed that New Delhi will find hard, if not impossible, to contain. Islamabad learned that lesson very bitterly in 1971.