Hindi 'imposed' in Gujarat, too; it began in 2014, Gujarati bears the brunt

The BJP’s “Hindi push” has not been limited to the southern states, as it may seem to many, thanks to the major pushback by Tamil Nadu.

Hindi “imposition” has been quietly at work in none other than Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat, and he has seemingly been a major architect of it.

Modi’s language switch

Here’s a case in point. While campaigning for the Lok Sabha elections last year, Modi addressed six rallies in the villages of north, central, and the Saurashtra region of Gujarat. All his speeches were in Hindi, barring the occasional sentence in Gujarati for effect.

This was a repeat of the Gujarat Assembly polls in 2022, when, too, Modi primarily preferred Hindi while addressing crowds at the dozen-odd rallies across the state.

However, things were dramatically different prior to 2014 — the year Modi assumed charge as the prime minister. During his 13-year stint as the Chief Minister of Gujarat before that, Modi would speak only in Gujarati at all rallies — often evoking the "Gujarati asmita” (Gujarati pride), associating it with the language, his mother tongue.

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Hindi 'imposition' in Gujarat

According to Hemangkumar Shah, a professor at Gujarat University, the BJP’s push for Hindi is purely political and has nothing to do as such with the language itself.

“Gujarat was not new to political speeches in Hindi. Many Congress leaders, including [former prime minister] Manmohan Singh and [Congress leader] Sonia Gandhi, addressed the public in Hindi, without using a translator, whenever they campaigned in Gujarat. But the BJP’s push for Hindi was political and that is the problem,” Shah told The Federal.

The “imposition of Hindi” happened even at the Gujarat Vidyapith — the only centre of study and research on Gujarati history, literature, and its dialects. And it was opposed by many, said Shah. “But despite that, funds meant for Gujarati research were diverted to open a Hindi department in 2016,” he added.

Hindi at the cost of Gujarati

Again, in 2019, at the birth centenary celebration of Mahatma Gandhi at the Gujarat Vidyapith, all the bhajans sung were in Hindi. Even then, some of the faculty opposed the move, as it defeats the very purpose of the establishment, Shah narrated.

But in 2022, Hindi was pushed yet again at a major academic event. “Union Home Minister Amit Shah told the teachers that they should encourage Hindi and Sanskrit to promote the reading of Vedas and Upanishads at the Indian Institute of Teacher Education,” Shah told The Federal.

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Three-language policy

Until 2014, Gujarati and English had been the official languages of the state, and all government orders and notifications were issued in these two languages. However, things began to change after 2014.

That year, after Modi became the prime minister, Gujarat hosted the Hindi Diwas Samaroh and the Akhil Bharatiya Rajbhasha Sammelan for the first time. The events were chaired by Amit Shah, who said in his speech that Hindi was a “sister language of Gujarati”.

That same year, via a Union government notification, all civil servants and ministers of the state were asked to use Hindi to communicate on social media. Soon after that, the state adopted a three-language policy with options between Hindi and Sanskrit for students of classes one to eight.

Push for Hindi

By 2016, many nationalised banks across the state began a drive to teach their employees Hindi. They would hang white boards with five Hindi words along with their Gujarati meanings daily, meant to be memorised by the employees.

“There was a push to promote Hindi after 2014,” agreed Indira Hirway, an author and sociologist based in Gujarat. “It was systematically promoted in Gujarat by the ruling government although it remains a language spoken in the cities only,” she added.

After 2014, ministers, MLAs, and even the local BJP politicians of major cities such as Ahmedabad and Vadodara were asked to learn and communicate in Hindi along with Gujarati. Government programmes in Gujarat started promoting Hindi for the first time, and official orders began to be issued in three languages — Gujarati, English and Hindi, Hirway narrated.

“Modi began to give speeches in Hindi even in the villages of Gujarat. That wasn’t the case before 2014,” Hirway added.

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A legal case over Hindi

For the lack of a census since 2011, it is not yet clear what the massive push by the BJP government at the Centre has done to brush up Gujarati people’s Hindi language skills. According to the last census — after which the push began — only 8 per cent of Gujaratis in the state could speak Hindi.

In fact, a group of farmers had sued the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI) in 2012 for issuing a land-acquisition notification in Hindi. And the court had ruled in their favour.

The NHAI had issued the land-acquisition notification, for the widening of the Ahmedabad-Saurashtra highway into four lanes, in Hindi, which the farmers failed to read. They later approached the Gujarat High Court objecting to it.

The judge had then ruled that Hindi was not understood by the villagers of Gujarat and directed the state government to issue state notifications in Gujarati and national notifications in both Hindi and Gujarati for rural areas.

Tolerance for languages

Gujarat, in general, has always had a tolerance for languages, unlike many other regions, says Hirway. “Gujarat was carved out of the bilingual Bombay State in 1960. But, unlike Maharashtra (which was also carved out of the same province), there have been no demands that people must speak in Gujarati alone; nor has there been any intolerance towards anyone speaking Hindi,” she added.

Hirway attributes Gujarat’s tolerance for other languages to the politicians who have historically shown acceptance for languages other than Gujarati. “For instance, former chief minister Chimanbhai Patel used to conduct his Cabinet meetings simultaneously in Gujarati and English. He would speak in Gujarati with ministers and in English with the bureaucrats at the same time,” she narrated.

Also, as the textile sector boomed in Gujarat during the 1980s and the state began to attract migrant workers from all over the country, Gujarat accepted the multiple languages the migrants brought with them. This is best seen in Surat (the textile hub), where the civic body runs public schools in Odia, Telugu, Urdu, Marathi, and Hindi besides Gujarati,” said Hirway.

“And that is possibly why the BJP never faced a pushback when they began to promote Hindi,” she suggested.