India’s Home Ministry last month ordered all bureaucrats to prioritise Hindi over English on official accounts on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. The BJP has long championed Hindi as a uniting force for India. It is the main language of the states of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, and the capital city Delhi. English and Hindi are the two offical languages of India. Approximately 422 million Indians (40) speak Hindi as the first or second language. Senior members of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) cite some practical reasons too, saying Modi is more at ease in Hindi than English and does not wish to be misunderstood, particularly in interviews. The largest number of Hindi speaking people is in India. “That’s the group he campaigned to, and that’s the group he’s from.” “He is trying to represent a different India, which is rural and small-town oriented,” said Ajay Gudavarthy, a politics professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. The push for greater use of Hindi by Modi, the son of a poor tea-seller who made a stunning political rise, has been read partly as a move to break from the anglophone elite of the dynastic Congress party, which he thrashed in parliamentary polls in April and May. The chief of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), a regional party in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, on Thursday slammed India’s home ministry for its social media diktat. Modi spoke in Hindi and used interpreters in meetings with South Asian leaders last month, and addressed the Bhutanese parliament in Hindi during his first official overseas trip last week.īut with more than half of India’s 1.2 billion people using another language as their mother tongue, the push for Hindi risks widening communication divides in a highly diverse country, especially in the southern and eastern states, where local languages or English are preferred.
Modi’s government has ordered its officials to use Hindi on social media accounts and in government letters. Hindi and English are India’s two official languages for federal government business, although India’s constitution recognizes a total of 22 languages. India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi comes out of a meeting room to receive his Bhutanese counterpart Tshering Tobgay before the start of their bilateral meeting in New Delhi May 27, 2014.
0 kommentar(er)
