Language and Politics of Exclusion

Illustration by ChatGPT

India’s education policy, NEP 2020, speaks the language of inclusion, but practises the politics of exclusion. On paper are noble ideas and sentiments. Instruction in mother tongue in the lower grades is pedagogically sound. Multilingualism is celebrated too on paper. Indian languages are seemingly empowered.

In practice, however, Hindi is quietly and cunningly elevated to a default national language. English is delegitimised as “colonial.” Regional languages are squeezed between Hindi from above and English from below. And this is not accidental; this is ideological. This is very BJP in style; very Modiesque, to be precise.

Children think, dream, and reason first in the language of the home. Early literacy in the mother tongue does help to strengthen later learning. Hence NEP’s recommendation of teaching in mother tongue up to Grade 5 does make pedagogical sense.

In the name of mother tongue, what is actually pushed by force is Hindi. One plain truth is that Hindi is as “foreign” as English to a sizeable population in India – sometimes more so. Teaching a Malayali child in Hindi is no more ‘natural’ than teaching her in English. At least English doesn’t pretend to be her mother.

Hypocrisy is another name for the BJP and India’s right wing in general. The following table shows that the top leaders of the party send their children abroad for higher studies while Hindi and mother tongue are forced down the throats of others.

BJP Leader	Child	Institution & Country	Degree/Field
Nirmala Sitharaman	Parakala Vangmayi	London School of Economics (UK)	Economics/Journalism
Piyush Goyal	Dhruv & Radhika Goyal	Harvard University (USA)	Investment Banking/Finance
S. Jaishankar	Dhruva Jaishankar	Georgetown University (USA)	Security Studies
Rajnath Singh	Neeraj Singh	Leeds University (UK)	MBA
Shivraj Singh Chouhan	Kartikeya Chouhan	University of Pennsylvania (USA)	LLM (Law)
Jyotiraditya Scindia	Mahaaryaman Scindia	Yale University (USA)	MBA
Dharmendra Pradhan	Naimisha Pradhan	The Fletcher School, Tufts (USA)	Master of Law
Gajendra Singh Shekhawat	Suhasini Shekhawat	Oxford University (UK)	Advanced Leadership [diploma]
JP Nadda	Harish Nadda	University of London (UK)	Law
Hardeep Singh Puri	Tilottama Puri	Warwick University (UK)	Bachelor of Arts

 

In a world that has already become a global village, a common universal language is of vital importance. Even in India, higher judiciary, higher education, science, technology, and global commerce all still run in English. Competitive exams, research, and international mobility depend on English. Yet we are told to shun English because it is elitist, alien, and anti-national.

It is the very ordinary people of India who will suffer the consequences of such biases. For the first-generation learners in the country as well as for many Dalit, Adivasi, and rural students, English is not cultural betrayal – it is escape velocity.

For the privileged, English is an inheritance. It is absorbed unconsciously – at home, in elite schools, through books, travel, and everyday exposure. It comes wrapped in confidence, accent, and style. For the underprivileged, English is an acquisition – hard-earned, late, and often humiliating. It is learned in overcrowded classrooms through grammar drills carried out by unskilled teachers. English is acquired with much difficulty by this section of Indians. That language is not a luxury for them but a lifeline that opens doors to higher education, employment, mobility, and dignity.

What NEP 2020 does subtly is to push English into private spaces such as elite schools, expensive coaching centres, and privileged homes. It is made to disappear from the common Indian’s world. Such policies do not level the field as claimed in theory; they rather fence the field. They transform English from a shared public resource into a private asset, ensuring that opportunity remains hereditary rather than earned.

A lot of damage is done by the present central government’s language policies. Hindi is used everywhere including the names of projects that should reach the poorest of the poor in non-Hindi states. This administrative Hindi seeks to displace local languages. Moreover, cultural prestige is centralised. Sanskrit-Hindi-Hindu civilisational narrative has become the only acceptable version in the country.

The deadliest damage is that all this is done very cleverly. On paper and in political rhetoric, there is openness to other languages and cultures. In practice, there is only one culture, one language, one religion.

I wish the government in Delhi – soon to be renamed Indraprastha – understands that languages do not threaten nations while forced uniformity does. A confident India would not fear English, nor privilege Hindi, nor suppress regional languages and cultures. It would trust its children to be multilingual and its democracy to sustain diversity.

PS. This post is part of a series on Education in India.

Previous Post [which also has links to others in the series]: Multidisciplinary Learning