Netaji vs the Queen's English

Mulayam Singh Yadav (Source: PTI)

HUNDREDS are spending sleepless nights in makeshift refugee homes after communal clashes broke out in Muzaffarnagar. 

The usual problems of poverty, electricity and water remain. The government has returned to gunda raj. 

And yet, 'the need of the hour' for Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav is to promote Hindi. 

And that too not Hindi in Uttar Pradesh's schools or on television, but the use of a colonial bhasha in Parliament, which according to him is a threat to national integrity. 

These are the same politicians who wouldn't think of putting their children in a Hindimedium school. The same ones whose kids would have a hard time completing two sentences without slipping an angrezi word in. 

And yet, their concern is the use of English in Parliament - that too on the shocking grounds that it will interfere with the country's development. 

Yadav might have a point, although he would be reluctant to admit it this way. His anti-English tirades usually forget to mention the tiny little detail that his son, Uttar Pradesh's chief minister Akhilesh Yadav, got his college degree in Australia - where Hindi-medium universities are a bit hard to find.

But all the 'development' that was supposed to come with Akhilesh's regime has amounted to nothing. 

Maybe that's what triggered Mulayam's move to automatically magnify the importance of the Hindi language through an anti-English law in Parliament? With a population of 1.2 billion, India has over a hundred regional languages. 

Of these, there are 22 officially recognised languages. How are our politicians - who already have enough trouble being understood and getting things done - expected to hear each other out in the name of development if they can't speak a language that is common?

© 2013 Nasreen Ghani

Published in Daily Mail and Mail Today:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/indiahome/indianews/article-2511383/WHIPLASH-Netaji-vs-Queens-English.html