India: The Force of Words

India’s Prime Minister Lai Bahadur Shastri last week was at the center of a linguistic whirlwind. The storm began to blow when a parliamentary decree was enacted making Hindi the nation’s official language. What bothered millions of non-Hindi-speaking Indians was the fear that they would lose out to the Hindi speakers in government jobs and promotions.

In Tamil-speaking Madras state, where five people have burned themselves to death in protest, a mob captured two policemen and burned them alive. In Malayalam-speaking Kerala state, mobs attacked post offices and trains, and students signed pledges of resistance to the “imposition of Hindi,” using their own blood as ink. State elections are scheduled for next month in Kerala, and the sudden emergence of the Hindi issue seems likely to hand victory back to the Communists, who ruled Kerala from 1957 to 1959.

At a Cabinet meeting, non-Hindi ministers backed the demand of Food Minister Chidambaram Subramaniam that English also be given statutory recognition as an official language. When they were voted down, Subramaniam and another minister resigned, shaking confidence in Shastri’s leadership. As the death toll in the riots rose to 60, Shastri made a nationwide broadcast appealing for law and order. Though he did not promise to restore English to parity with Hindi, he did assure the nation that jobs and opportunities for advancement were in no way endangered by Hindi’s becoming the official language.

Next day Madras was quiet, but violence flared in Bengal and the former French colony of Pondicherry. Indira Gandhi, daughter of the late Jawaharlal Nehru, said that Shastri was ready to compromise, and the Law Ministry was reportedly preparing a draft proposal for presentation next week to the chief ministers of India’s 16 states. That would not necessarily end Shastri’s troubles. Hindi fanatics might well generate an even more violent whirlwind if their dream of language supremacy is shattered.