Ajay Devgan stir a hornet’s nest by chirping supremacy of Hindi
In the midst of the ongoing bitter controversy over Azaan and Hanuman chalisa, a simple tweet by actor Ajay Devgan has revived the simmering discontent between South and North over the status of Hindi. The row erupted when Devgan came out with a tweet implying that Hindi is India's national language. In the wake of Home Minister Amit Shah recently singing paeans for the Hindi language, Devgan’s remarks acted like fuel to fire. What started off as a Twitter exchange between Devgn and Kannada actor Kichcha Sudeep took a political turn when two former Karnataka Chief Ministers flayed Devgan asserting that Hindi is not India's national language. Former Karnataka CM HD Kumaraswamy said, Ajaya Devgan’s blabbered as a mouthpiece of BJP’s Hindi nationalism of one nation, one tax, one language & one government. Another former state CM Siddaramaiah also slammed Devgn's tweet saying Hindi was never and will never be our national language, and every Indian must respect the linguistic diversity of our country. At the same time, Karnataka Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai and NC's Omar Abdullah also backed linguistic diversity in the country.
Sudeep had said that “Hindi is no more our national language”. To this, Devgn responded with a tweet in Hindi on Wednesday: “My brother, according to you if Hindi is not our national language then why do you release your mother tongue movies by dubbing them in Hindi? Hindi was, is and always will be our mother tongue and national language. Jan Gan Man.” At the core of the controversy is suspicion among a section of non-Hindi speaking people both from South and Northeast that the Centre wanted to impose Hindi as a national language, thus relegating their own mother tongues to the third spot behind English and Hindi, In South India where the majority of the people are fanatically obsessed with their language and culture, any such remote attempt could ignite passion. India does not have not an official national language. The states may adopt one or more of the 22 languages listed in the Indian constitution's eighth schedule — Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Marathi, Meitei, Nepali, Odia, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. As the hashtag ‘HindiIsNotNationalLanguage' trended on Twitter , it’s time for everyone to remember that india’s beurty lies in its diversity.
