Rajya Sabha Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu on Wednesday turned out to be a polyglot as he spoke one sentence in ten languages. Naidu exhibited his virtuosity after announcing that Elders can now make speech in their mother tongue and all 22 Indian languages will automatically get translated into English and Hindi in the Upper House.
At present, this facility is available for only 17 languages listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution. The five new languages included in the list are: Dogri, Kashmiri, Konkani, Santhali, and Sindhi.
Informing about the facility for simultaneous interpretation of member’s speech for the benefit of the chair, reporters of the Rajya Sabha who record speeches, and the media, Naidu spoke one sentence in ten languages, including Tamil, Kannada, Punjabi, Bangla, Gujarati, Malyalam, Nepali, Oriya, and Telugu. The sentence conveyed that “the member wants to speak in his or her language”. Incidentally, it was a record of sorts when the Upper House Chairman spoke in ten languages.
Urging the MPs to make their point in their mother tongue, Naidu said he was a votary of this as a member can express himself or herself better in their mother tongue as the speech will have more weight and it will have “bhasha coupled with bhavana.”
The RS Chairman informed the House that special translators have been hired for the job but also asked the members to bear with the translators for initial glitches, if any. The Rajya Sabha already has interpretation facility for 12 languages and interpreters of the lok Sabha are made available for five other languages.
Now, the Upper House has interpreters for all the 22 languages but the Elders will have to give a prior notice for the interpreter in the RS Secretariat. Describing it as a wonderful gesture, BJP leader Subramanian Swamy said efforts should be made to include Sanskrit words in the vocabulary.
Naidu also mentioned that the Rajya Sabha has for the first time in 66 years signed a pact with a parliamentary institution of a foreign country when it entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Senate of Rawanda earlier this month. The MoU provides for inter-parliamentary dialogue and parliamentary exchange visits among others, he said. Till now, only the lok Sabha used to enter into such kind of agreements with foreign parliamentary institutions.
The RS Chairman also informed the House that July 18 is the 100th birth anniversary of Nelson Mandela and highlighted the role played by him in ending apartheid in South Africa. Mandela was incarcerated in prison for 27 years and later became President of that nation, Naidu said, adding Mandela followed Mahatma Gandhi in his struggle against racial discrimination.