Language Games
- Correspondent
- Jun 30
- 2 min read
In Maharashtra, it often takes a political bonfire for the government to realise it has been playing with matches. The ruling Mahayuti coalition’s decision to roll back its controversial move to make Hindi compulsory in the state’s primary schools is a textbook case of how not to legislate in a multilingual, federal democracy. While the move is certainly a welcome one, the reversal, announced by Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, comes-off as a panicked retreat in the face of a mounting backlash that could have been avoided altogether.
At the heart of the controversy were two Government Resolutions (GRs) which sought to implement a three-language formula from Class 1 in all English and Marathi medium schools. Under the April diktat, Hindi was to become a compulsory third language, in effect overriding parental choice and linguistic diversity in the name of national integration. After the policy sparked a public outcry and led to a rare display of unity among opposition parties such as the Shiv Sena (UBT), MNS, and NCP (SP), the Mahayuti amended the GR earlier this month to make Hindi optional. It wasn’t enough. Ultimately, the political cost had grown so steep that a full rollback became inevitable.
This was not, as Fadnavis has claimed, an act of visionary course correction. It was a climbdown. Worse, it was a crisis entirely of the government’s own making. The Mashelkar Committee, whose report the Mahayuti claims to have followed, had been set up in 2020 under the previous MVA government to examine how the National Education Policy (NEP) might be implemented in Maharashtra. Yet at no point did that report mandate compulsion from Class 1, nor did it anticipate the rigid imposition of Hindi in a state with its own proud linguistic identity. If anything, the political context should have made the government tread more carefully, not less.
Fadnavis’s attempts to pass the buck onto Uddhav Thackeray’s earlier regime seem unconvincing. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the Mahayuti misread the room entirely, choosing to appease a larger ideological constituency rather than the electorate of Maharashtra.
The damage, however, has already been done. It has cast the government as one willing to meddle in the classroom for political mileage, rather than prioritise educational outcomes. It has also handed the opposition a tailor-made platform to paint the BJP-led alliance as indifferent to Marathi pride, an issue that carries electoral weight in both urban and rural constituencies.
The hurried appointment of a new committee under educationist Dr. Narendra Jadhav to revisit the issue is a prudent, if belated, move.
Multilingualism in India is not a problem to be solved but a fact to be accommodated. Hindi may be spoken by many, but in Maharashtra, Marathi remains the emotional anchor. Recognising this is not parochialism but prudence. That the Mahayuti had to learn this the hard way does not speaks well of its political wisdom.
Next time, perhaps, they could think before issuing a GR.
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