‘India, not Hindia’: row over India’s languages heats up during Hindi Diwas

India has 23 official languages but PM Modi and BJP party have long pushed for Hindi’s dominance, although it’s not spoken much in some areas

Political heavyweight M.K. Stalin has now weighed in during Hindi Day celebrations, criticising government policy to make Hindi primary language

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India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a groundbreaking ceremony for a Hindu temple. File photo: AFP

Published: 7:43pm, 16 Sep 2022

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s years-long campaign for Hindi to obtain primacy across the country is once again in the spotlight, with detractors slamming this week’s commemoration of ‘Hindi Diwas’ or Hindi Day.

More than half of the country’s 1.4 billion people consider other languages as their mother tongue. In the country’s south and east in particular, Hindi - which is one of two languages along with English used for federal government business - is not widely spoken.

The likes of political heavyweight M.K. Stalin, chief minister of the southernmost state of Tamil Nadu, has now criticised the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for what is seen as a persistent policy to make Hindi the country’s primary language.

“It is India, Not Hindia,” he said in a statement released by his ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) party. “Indian languages including Tamil should be declared as official languages of the Union Government.”

Stalin, chief of the DMK, has been a strong opponent of Modi and the BJP, saying in August that there was “no relationship” between the two parties.

Hindi is one of India’s 23 official languages, and the third most spoken language in the world, according to a 2022 report by Ethnologue, an annual reference publication with information on the world’s languages.