Northeast States agree to make Hindi compulsory: Amit Shah

Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Thursday said that all the eight states of the North East have agreed to make Hindi compulsory in schools up to Class X, a statement issued by the Home ministry stated.
Presiding over the 37th meeting of the Parliamentary Official Language Committee here, Shah on Thursday said Hindi should be accepted as an alternative to English and not to local languages.
He said that 20,000 Hindi teachers have been recruited in the eight states of the North East, adding that nine tribal communities of the North East have converted their dialects’ scripts to Devanagari.”
He also said Prime Minister Narendra Modi has decided that the medium of running the government is the official language and this will definitely increase the importance of Hindi.
Shah informed the members that now 70 per cent of the agenda of the Cabinet is prepared in Hindi. The home minister described Hindi as “the language of India”, and said that it should be used by citizens from different states to communicate with each other.
Oppn cries ‘imposition’
Home Minister Amit Shah’s pitch for the Hindi language provoked trenchant criticism on Friday, with opposition parties calling it an assault on India’s pluralism and asserting they will thwart the move to impose “Hindi imperialism”.
The opposition party also said Shah was trying to divert public attention from the issues of inflation and price rise. Congress leader Jairam Ramesh said Hindi is ‘Raj Bhasha’ (official language) and not ‘Rashtra Bhasha’ (national language), as Rajnath Singh had noted in Parliament when he was the home minister.
Congress spokesperson Abhishek Singhvi said the home minister has tried to sermonise about Hindi which he should not.
He also alleged that by raking up the issue of Hindi, the home minister is also trying to divert people’s attention from inflation and price rise. Tamil Nadu chief minister MK Stalin on Friday fumed at Union Home Minister Amit Shah, saying his is an act that “will hurt the unity of India” and warned the BJP not to “commit the same mistake.
In a series of tweets in Tamil, Stalin accused the BJP of “eroding the diversity of India” through statements like the one Shah made on Thursday at the 37th meeting of the Parliamentary Official Language Committee. “Union Home Minister Amit Shah asking people to use Hindi instead of English is an act that will hurt the unity of India. The BJP continues to engage with its job of eroding the diversity of India… You (BJP) are committing the same mistake. You will never succeed,” the CM added.
Tamil Nadu Finance Minister P Thiagarajan related Amit Shah’s comments to “chauvinism” and called his logic “economically inverse”
Former Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah accused the BJP of trying to unleash its agenda of “cultural terrorism” against non-Hindi speaking states.
Siddaramaiah accused Shah of betraying the former’s home state Gujarat and mother-tongue Gujarati for Hindi, for his political agenda.
Another ex-CM of Karnataka HD Kumaraswamy alleged that the Central government is trying to “forcibly run personal agenda” adding that they will not succeed.
TMC said any effort to impose Hindi by BJP-led Centre on non-Hindi speaking states will be resisted.
Pointing out that Hindi was not India’s national language, the TMC said his agenda of “’one nation, one language and one religion” will remain unfulfilled.