HINDI VS ENGLISH-OFFICIAL LANGUAGE PROBLEM

 The official language problem; English Vs Hindi flared up in early 1965 during Shastri’s tenure. The central government did not handle the situation effectively and the problem deteriorated. The problem was resolved only in early 1966 after Shastri’s death and with Indira Gandhi at the helm. 

However, the tussle for language started much earlier than that. The Congress government of C Rajagopalachari made teaching of Hindi compulsory in schools of the Madras Presidency in 1937 itself. This led to an anti-Hindi imposition agitation. This move was immediately opposed by EV Ramaswamy Naicker or Periyar and also the Justice Party. There was a crackdown on people by the government and 2 people died and 1198 imprisoned. Ultimately the government resigned in 1939 and the Governor of Madras withdrew the compulsory teaching of Hindi in 1940.

The official language issue was hotly debated in Parliament and after an exhaustive and divisive debate, Hindi was adopted as the official language of India with English continuing as an associate official national language for a period of 15 years till 1965. Efforts by the government to make Hindi the sole official language after 1965 met with opposition from non-Hindi speaking states. The DMK led the opposition to Hindi. To smoothen the feathers, Nehru enacted the official language act 1963 to ensure English being continued to be used after 1965.

The text of the Act did not satisfy the DMK which suspected that the assurances would not be honoured by future generations. As 1965 drew near the fear snowballed into an agitation in Madras with lot of support coming from college students. On 25^th January the riots spread all over Madras and continued for over 2 months. They were marked by violence, arson, looting, Police firing and Lathi charges. The Congress government of Madras called in the army which resulted in 70 deaths of the people. Finally, the PM Lal Bahadur Shastri gave an assurance that English would continue to be used as the official language as long as the non Hindi speaking states wanted.

This language agitation led to the fall of the Congress and the DMK came to power in the 1967 elections. Thereafter the Congress could never get back in Tamilnadu. Finally in 1967, Indira Gandhi amended the Official Languages Act in 1967 and brought in a provision in it that which said that both Hindi and English would be continued to be used as official languages indefinitely.