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Chitra Subramaniam| June 20, 2014| 5.00 pm IST|As debates and discussions go, this one is really silly. Ask Kanimozeee. The government order asking all bureaucrats to make Hindi their social
media language has got many English speakers in the India in a tail-spin. In a country where half the people cannot read or write any language and the other half murders most Indian
languages it speaks including their mother tongue – and that is only a slight exaggeration – the order has stirred up old wounds and floated conspiracy theories galore. The latest spin
is this will ensure that Prime Minister’s Narendra Modi’s and BJP will slip a few notches in the Assembly elections in Maharashtra, the other is that it will please Uttar Pradesh and yet
another is that with this, the government can be sure to lose Bengal. Of course, you must have also read that senior BJP leader and Home Minister Rajnath Singh bowled a googly with the
order. The first anti-Hindi agitation pre-dates India’s independence (1937) and was launched to oppose compulsory Hindi in schools in the Madras presidency. India has seen many language
agitations and whether the latest one is a ploy to stir trouble in the NDA is something pundits can argue about. We did some research, made a few phone calls and this is what we think – no
good can come from forcing people into a language muddle. It has not succeeded anywhere in the world in comparable situations. It is not about to succeed in India, plot or not plot.
Europeans speak twenty-four languages for twenty eight countries which together have a population of 742 million people. Tweet all the time, they are on social media and the World Wide Web
was invested in Geneva which also sits on the French border. If you ring the European Union (EU) switchboard, you will get instructions in four languages of which two will be English and
French. The other languages are Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portugese,
Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish. Read European policy on languages here. None of these languages have died because others have been spoken. “While the language of business
and politics is English, French and German, the EU policy gives equal weightage to all the languages,†Dina Avraam from European office that promotes multilingualism. “We expect our
citizens to speak the mother tongue and atleast two other languages – languages are out identity,†she adds. If we have to start somewhere, it has to be there, with a mother tongue. In
Switzerland which has four official languages – French, Italian, German and Romansch – children to go German, Italian and French schools where the second language is introduced at the
end of the primary and English later on as an option in some areas. When a Swede and an Italian conduct business, the language is English. People score goals in the world cup, some eve
n eat with spoons and write with pencils, announcements in planes are often in two languages, sometimes three, a Bengali and a Tamilian speak English to understand each other. India’s
favourite game is called cricket in all Indian languages and people running between wickets score runs.If the government wants, it can set up dedicated twitter handles and social media
accounts for all of India’s languages so nothing is lost. But imposing something will ensure that nothing is gained. In all this, some people have been tweeting in English that Sanskrit
should be made the official language. It naturally follows then that in their view, half the world speaks Latin. Postscript: This is serious. Fewer and fewer Indians speak any language
correctly. A major correction has to happen there. The rest will follow.