The New Indian Express ·
Education
Set aside political differences to promote Indian languages, says Amit Shah
Political differences should be set aside to promote Indian languages, Union Home Minister Amit Shah said Monday, saying that a child can understand the country only through their mother tongue.
Speaking at the inauguration of the 6th All India Rajbhasha Sammelan, Shah said the government’s aim was to make Indian languages the language of governance and science and enrich them through literature.
“Political differences must be set aside to promote Indian languages. A child can understand India only through the mother tongue,” he said.
He linked the promotion of Indian languages to PM Narendra Modi’s pledge of freeing the country from a “mindset of slavery”. He said cultural nationalism meant creating awareness about India’s culture and history, asserting that the country’s languages could have different voices but the national sentiment should remain one.
Shah said ‘Hindi Shabd Sindhu’, which began with 51,000 words, has now grown to eight lakh words and expressed confidence that it would become the world’s largest dictionary by 2029.
“More than 50,000 words from Indian regional languages had been incorporated into ‘Hindi Shabd Sindhu’ to fill gaps where Hindi lacked words. The dictionary had accepted words from Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali and Odia etc, thereby making Hindi more flexible,” he added.
Shah credited Modi with making mother-tongue education compulsory under the National Education Policy (NEP), and said students were also required to learn another Indian language.
“Those opposing NEP provision of learning one more Indian language apart from mother tongue do not know what sin they are committing,” he said.
Shah said Hindi should not be viewed as being in competition with other Indian languages, stressing that all languages were interconnected.
Citing Rabindranath Tagore, the home minister compared Indian culture and literature to a many-petalled lotus, with each regional language forming a petal.
He described Maharashtra as the country’s only multi-lingual state and said all languages there had flourished and were respected. He also noted that the Modi government had accorded Marathi the status of a classical language.
Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj had treated ‘Swaraj’, ‘Swadharma’ and ‘Swabhasha’ as integral parts of self-rule and had given importance to Marathi in governance, he added.
On Vande Mataram, Shah said it had taken 80 years to restore the national song to its “full glory”. He said the song was not merely a composition but an effort to awaken Indian consciousness during the freedom struggle and had laid the foundation of India’s “cultural nationalism”.
Referring to the decision to restrict official rendition of the song to its first two stanzas, Shah said it had taken decades to restore it to its original prominence.
“Vande Mataram once again got its glory and began to be sung in full at all government functions because India got a prime minister like Narendra Modi,” he said.
(With inputs from PTI)
