– Rahul Singh

The National Education Policy (NEP) approved by Parliament in 2020 has been widely praised. However, it has a major flaw that hasn’t been adequately addressed, viz its promotion of Hindi, while simultaneously disparaging English. The disastrous — unimplemented and unimplementable — three language policy, instead of being discarded, has been given a new lease of life by NEP 2020.

Indeed, the policy goes further: the Union education ministry has been tasked to provide undergraduate engineering programmes in Hindi and regional languages, even though they are painfully short of the scientific terminology and literature needed for higher education. In particular, Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), among the few publicly-funded institutions of higher learning that are world-class, are also targeted in this language madness. The faculty of the IITs have global exposure and teach in English, the global language of industry and commerce. They are a proud and powerful symbol of India’s unity in diversity. To regionalise them would be a disservice to the nation.

Moreover, the BJP/NDA government’s downplaying of English and promotion of shuddh Hindi (as opposed to the more colloquial and comprehensible Hindustani) is not in the national interest. Hindustani is by far the most spoken language in the country. But recent surveys indicate that English is the second most spoken language, and more importantly, it’s widely spoken in all of India’s linguistic states, making it the country’s premier link language.

A report of the United District Information System of Education (UDISE) is telling. It covers 265 million children in 1.5 million schools, from the primary to higher secondary level. It reveals that 26 percent of all children are enrolled in English-medium schools, though Hindi remains a much bigger medium of instruction. All southern states, except Karnataka, have more children in English-medium, than in vernacular schools. Surprisingly, this is even so in Punjab, Haryana and Delhi.

In many English-medium schools, instruction is imparted in the local language. What this means is that the children want to be taught in English, but they can only do so if their teacher instructs them in their mother tongue, a truly bizarre situation and reality. The parents of these children converse with their kids in the vernacular at home, yet are keen that their children become fluent in English as well. Clearly, English has become an aspirational Indian language, not a colonial one, as the ruling party projects it.

The BJP has lately been propagating Subhash Chandra Bose as a national icon, on a par with Gandhi and Sardar Patel. It may surprise many to learn that Bose was an advocate of Hindi written in the Roman script. After a trip to Turkey in 1934, he said: “To promote national unity, we shall have to develop our lingua franca and a common script,” while adding that a mix of Hindi and Urdu was best (i.e, Hindustani). “But I am inclined to think the ultimate solution would be the adoption of a script which would bring us in line with the rest of the world… Perhaps some of our countrymen would gape with horror when they hear of the adoption of the Roman script, but I would beg them to consider this problem from the scientific and historical point of view.”

However, Hindi fundamentalists would have none of this. The result was that the imposition of Hindi in the south led to such a strong anti-Hindi agitation in Tamil Nadu in the 1960s that the nation was on the verge of breaking up. In Turkey, the great reformer, Kemal Ataturk, decided in 1928 that Turkish in the Arabic script, which had been used for 1,000 years, should be replaced by the Roman script (with suitable phonetic requirements for Turkish), as it was much easier to learn. As a result, Turkey’s then abysmal ten percent literacy rate shot up to 90 percent, on a par with any developed country.

The example of Indonesia, the fourth most populous country of the world, is even more instructive. An archipelago of some 17,000 islands, it hosts 1,300 different ethnic groups who communicate in 730 languages. Intelligent Indonesian leaders realised that when they got their independence from the Dutch, the choice of one national language would be problematic. They did something quite remarkable. A body of students got together and decided not to choose Javanese, which was spoken by 40 percent of Indonesians, as the national language. Instead, they chose Malay, later to be called Bahasa Indonesia, which only 4 percent spoke. Malay was a simple and easy-to-learn language, used by traders and sailors. And the students decided that it would be written in the Roman script.

In 1928, a decision to this effect was taken. Over the years, Bahasa (taken from the Hindi bhasha) in the Roman script has developed into the undisputed lingua franca of Indonesia. The other, older languages, with their own scripts, have continued, but Indonesia hasn’t had a serious national language problem, whereas India still does. Apart from Turkey and Indonesia, several other countries including Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Somalia have also adopted the Roman script, They have no hang-ups about a ‘colonial’ script, like the ruling party here does.

(Rahul Singh is the former editor of the Reader’s Digest and Indian Express)