Greetings,
This week, I have four articles to share with you.
In BJP & the ‘Hindi as National Language’ Debate: A Gift That Keeps on Giving, published in The Quint, I reflect on Hindi-language chauvinism, which has again reared its head, this time in Bollywood, of all places. Eighty crore Indians do not consider Hindi to be their mother tongue, and it is absurd to claim that Hindi is our national language – or even, as some have, that one cannot be truly Indian without speaking Hindi. Hindi imposition will only further divide India and hack away at the inclusivity and diversity that is our core strength.
For Manorama, I argue: India must make sincere efforts to broker peace in Ukraine. Prime Minister Modi’s trip to Europe will no doubt have apprised him of the severe impact of Russia’s war in Ukraine, and further highlighted India’s neither-here-nor-there position on the issue. I suggest that it is time to take up the suggestion made by some European leaders: India should use its good relations with Russia to at least try and broker a peace plan. Although success would be far from guaranteed, it is an effort worth making, not least because it may help rehabilitate India’s tarnished international image.
In New India, Old Europe, published in Mathrubhumi, I stay on the issue of Modi’s trip to Europe and examine India’s relationship with the European Union. While India has close ties with a number of EU member states, its links with the bloc as a whole lack substance, and there is very little real interaction between New Delhi and Brussels. Both the EU and India seem to see past each other, despite the many areas in which more substantial cooperation would be mutually beneficial. It would be a shame if such potential went to waste.
Finally, the Indian Express published an excerpt from the prologue I wrote for Good Innings: The Extraordinary, Ordinary Life of Lily Tharoor, written by my sister Shobha Tharoor Srinivasan and released by Penguin Viking on May 8. In this piece, I write about my relationship with my mother, and the way my admiration for her brilliance and dedication has grown with time.
1. BJP & the ‘Hindi as National Language’ Debate: A Gift That Keeps on Giving; The Quint; April 30, 2022.
For controversialists, the debate over Hindi as the “national language” is the gift that keeps on giving. When all thought that the outrage needlessly stirred up by Home Minister Amit Shah’s tone-deaf advocacy of Hindi had died down, it erupted again, when the actor Ajay Devgn, not a noted linguist, waded into the debate feet first — of course in Hindi.
2. India must make sincere efforts to broker peace in Ukraine; Manorama; May 6, 2022.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Europe this week will have proved revelatory to him on two counts. First, he will not have been left in any doubt about the passions raging through the Continent over the unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine. Second, he will also have realised that the same European countries have high regard for India, value their relationship with New Delhi – and want to see it acting more in sympathy with their values on the word stage.
3. New India, Old Europe; Mathrubhumi; May 8, 2022.
Prime Minister’s Modi’s trip to Europe this week, preceded last week by the visit to New Delhi of EU President Ursula von der Leyen, has prompted renewed interest in India’s relations with Europe. India has a number of affinities with Europe and with the European Union, not least since it, too, is an economic and political union of a number of linguistically, culturally and ethnically different states. Both are unwieldy unions of just under thirty states, both are bureaucratic, both are coalition-ridden and both are slow to make decisions. But in practice these affinities have not translated into close political or strategic relations.
4. Prologue excerpt from Good Innings, by Shobha Tharoor Srinivasan; Indian Express; May 10, 2022.
For the last two years, as I write these words, my mother and I have been living together, as we had not done for any significant period since I went off to college at sixteen. It has been a revelation to me, and I daresay to her as well. My mother has always relished her independence. Whether it was her insistence, into her eighties, to drive herself on frequent four-hour trips from Kochi, where she lived, to her tharavad veedu (ancestral home) in Palakkad district, or in her stubborn refusal to hire full-time domestic help, self-reliance was always my mother’s mantra. She doesn’t like depending on others’ help.
The complete text of each article is below. As always, if these are getting too much, feel free to unsubscribe below.
With warm regards,
Shashi Tharoor
***************
BJP & the ‘Hindi as National Language’ Debate: A Gift That Keeps on Giving,
April 30, 2022,
The Quint.
For controversialists, the debate over Hindi as the “national language” is the gift that keeps on giving. When all thought that the outrage needlessly stirred up by Home Minister Amit Shah’s tone-deaf advocacy of Hindi had died down, it erupted again, when the actor Ajay Devgn, not a noted linguist, waded into the debate feet first — of course in Hindi. After Kannada actor Kichcha Sudeep had accurately said Hindi is not the national language of India (the Constitution in fact does not name a “national language”, only two “official languages”, Hindi and English), Devgn decided to school Sudeep in a tweet written in Hindi: “My brother, if according to you Hindi is not our national language, then why do you release your movies in your mother tongue by dubbing them in Hindi? Hindi was, is and always will be our mother tongue and national language.”
Sudeep could have pointed out that Hindi wasn’t his mother tongue, as it isn’t mine, or that of half the country, and that it isn’t our national language either, but was too polite to do so. Instead he was conciliatory, proclaiming his love and respect for Hindi, but pointedly added: “No offense, sir, but I was wondering what’d the situation be if my response was typed in kannada!? Don’t we too belong to India, sir?”
Of course this was impossible for others to resist. Two former Chief Ministers of Karnataka immediately took to Twitter. Former CM H.D. Kumaraswamy issued a string of seven tweets accusing Devgn of “blabbering” as “a mouth piece of BJP’s Hindi Nationalism of one nation, one tax, one language & one government”. His successor Siddaramaiah tweeted with equal passion, “Hindi was never & will never be our National Language. It is the duty of every Indian to respect linguistic diversity of our Country. Each language has its own rich history for its people to be proud of. I am proud to be a Kannadiga!!”.
Poor Devgn, who moonlights as the cop Singham (which he must be aware is a good Tamil name), probably didn’t know what hit him. Other actors sought to pour oil on the troubled waters, only fanning the flames. Kangana Ranaut weighed in for Sanskrit: “Today within the country we are using English as the link to communicate. Should that be the link, or should Hindi or Sanskrit be that link, or Tamil? We have to take that call. So, keeping all these things in mind, a decisive call should be taken. As of now, Hindi is the national language according to the Constitution,” she said. Wrong, Ms Ranaut – according to the Constitution, it is not, so you were stumped. Sonu Sood treied to take the debate to another level: “India has one language, which is entertainment.“ Kichcha Sudeep has wisely chosen to remain silent since then.
But politicians know no such restraint, and a UP Minister decided to play arsonist. Sanjay Nishad, founder of the Nirbal Indian Shoshit Hamara Aam Dal, commonly referred to as the NISHAD Party, and an ally of the BJP, declared (of course in Hindi): “Those who want to live in India should love Hindi. If you do not love Hindi, it will be assumed that you are a foreigner or are linked to foreign powers. We respect regional languages, but this country is one, and India’s Constitution says, that India is ‘Hindustan’ which means a place for Hindi speakers.” (Wrong again: the Constitution does not even use the word “Hindustan”, referring only to “India that is Bharat”.)
But then Nishad compounded inaccuracy with offensiveness. “Hindustan is not a place for those who don’t speak Hindi. They should leave this country and go somewhere else,” he self-righteously pronounced.
One hopes his allies in the BJP government of India realise how dangerous such a proposition is. The more than 80 crore people in India who do not consider Hindi their mother tongue and either do not speak it, or do so badly, have nowhere else to go. If the likes of Nishad want them to leave, that can only mean they leave with the territories on which they reside – in other words, the break-up of India.
Behind Nishad’s imprecations is a deep-seated resentment of English as a language of the elite, linked to the conviction, widely shared across the Hindi-speaking cow-belt of Northern India, that theirs, as the majority language, ought to prevail in India. Putting aside for a moment the debate about whether Hindi is really the language of the majority of Indians – it only comes close if you assimilate Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Maithili and several other kindred languages into it as “dialects” – the dangers of this ought to be readily apparent. The forces in power in today’s India are wedded to the idea of a Hindu Rashtra, which they have been seeking assiduously to promote. The linguistic counterpart of this dream is to create a Hindi Rashtra as well.
This debate had been settled when the Constitution was written. As Rajaji sagely cautioned the Hindi chauvinists of his era: “Is not just and fair dealing by all the geographically distributed people of this great country as important at least as national pride?’ Dr Ambedkar, too, had expressed the view that the utility of a single language nationwide in the administration and the justice system required the continuation of English as a matter of practical convenience. Rajaji also gave short shrift to the argument that Hindi was a language of the Indian masses while English was used only by the deracinated elites: “When the Hindi protagonists are speaking of the masses they are obviously thinking of the masses of the Hindi area only; they ignore the masses in non-Hindi India who are no less in number.” Nationalism, he feared, was being used to conceal the naked self-interest of the Hindi-speakers of the north: “Love of oneself may easily masquerade as love of language, and love of language as love of country. Let us not deceive ourselves or others with chauvinistic slogans.”
But such deception is a favoured political tactic in our country. The first lie is that hoary chestnut the Hindi chauvinists bandy about, that Hindi is the “national language” in India. In fact, all our languages are as “national” as Hindi. The second is that the advocacy of Hindi is an emotional matter of national pride, when in fact it reflects the ideological agenda of those in power who believe in a nationalism of ‘one language, one religion, one nation’.
This “Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan” cause is anathema not just to those Indians who hail from the South or North-east, but to all who believe in a diverse, inclusive India, whose languages are all equally authentic. Trying to impose Hindi will divide the country tragically. As I have observed before, language should be an instrument of opportunity, not of oppression. Oppression should, and will, be resisted.
The Hindi zealots, like the orthographically-challenged Devgn, are unnecessarily provoking a battle they will lose – because the country itself will be lost if they pursue it. Ironically, they are doing so at a time when they were quietly winning the war; Bollywood has ensured that much of India picks up some Hindi because it is the principal language of entertainment. As Devgn pointed out, Kichcha Sudeep and other Southern stars happily dub their films in Hindi to reach northern audiences. Language, after all, is a means, not an end.
“Unity in diversity” is a cliché because it expresses the truth about India. Leave well enough alone, and Hindi will continue to grow in popularity. Try to impose it, and our diversity will end up destroying our unity.
***************
India must make sincere efforts to broker peace in Ukraine,
May 6, 2022,
Manorama.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Europe this week will have proved revelatory to him on two counts. First, he will not have been left in any doubt about the passions raging through the Continent over the unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine. Second, he will also have realised that the same European countries have high regard for India, value their relationship with New Delhi – and want to see it acting more in sympathy with their values on the word stage.
On the first count, the evidence is both visible and audible. Ukraine dominates the news, and Ukrainian flags are flying everywhere, even in historically neutral Switzerland. Germany, which depends in Russia for 60% of its energy needs, has taken a decision to wean itself off Russian oil and gas. Even Britain’s beleaguered Prime Minister Boris Johnson found that expressing solidarity with Ukraine, visiting President Zelensky in Kyiv and then addressing the Ukrainian Parliament, even remotely, would bolster his dwindling popularity.
This means India is clearly out of sync with European opinion, and it was good that the PM went to Europe to discover for himself first-hand how strongly countries feel about this issue. At the same time, he would have been reassured to hear his European hosts express understanding for India’s position, even while expressing the hope that New Delhi would begin to see things their way.
One concrete suggestion did emerge, though, during the PM’s visit to Denmark. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen called on India to use its good relations with Russia to bring about peace. As a country that has consistently, even tiresomely, kept calling for both countries to adopt the diplomatic path, and stressed that peace is in everybody’s interest, such a challenge would fit right in to India’s current stance on the Ukrainian war.
But it is easier said than done. Israel and Turkey have both tried to broker peace negotiations, with little to show for it. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was in Moscow and Kyiv last week, but not a glimmer of progress emerged from his visit. French President Macron has no doubt briefed Modi on the failures of his frequent calls to President Putin. The Russians seem disinclined to make peace, and as Western weapons keep pouring into Ukraine, the victims are not too keen on suing for peace either. Both sides seem to think that they can win this war.
Our Prime Minister was right to say that there will be no winners, whatever happens in this conflict – but getting the warring parties to realise that will be no easy task.
Still, diplomacy is not only about pursuing guaranteed success. Sometimes the effort must be made, both because the scale of the suffering and destruction warrant the effort, and also because, if India wants its claims to a permanent seat on the Security Council to be taken seriously, it must assert itself on issues that have little or nothing do with its own immediate interests.
Playing peace-maker and go-between came naturally to Nehru’s India in the 1950s – in Korea, Laos, the Suez crisis, and Cambodia, to name a few of the many situations in which Indian diplomacy was active at that time. Today, at a time when reports of rising intolerance and islamophobia at home have tarnished India’s image abroad, a significant attempt to broker peace between the two antagonists (rather than just rhetorically calling for it) will help burnish the country’s credentials before the world. Any takers in Delhi?
***************
New India, Old Europe,
May 8, 2022,
Mathrubhumi.
Prime Minister’s Modi’s trip to Europe this week, preceded last week by the visit to New Delhi of EU President Ursula von der Leyen, has prompted renewed interest in India’s relations with Europe. India has a number of affinities with Europe and with the European Union, not least since it, too, is an economic and political union of a number of linguistically, culturally and ethnically different states. Both are unwieldy unions of just under thirty states, both are bureaucratic, both are coalition-ridden and both are slow to make decisions. But in practice these affinities have not translated into close political or strategic relations.
India has had a very long history of relations with the Old Continent, going back to the days of the Roman Empire. After centuries of languishing, trade is once more a major determinant of the relationship. The European Union (EU) is India’s second largest trading partner, accounting for 20 per cent of India’s global trade in goods, in addition to services exports and imports. But Europe’s contribution to India’s overall global trade has been shrinking: the percentage of India’s total trade made up by imports from and exports to EU member states has in fact been decreasing even while the Indian economy grows. Negotiations for a Free Trade Agreement have long being held up over a number of issues, from India’s resistance to reduced tariffs for automobile imports to European-dictated provisions on climate change and human rights, which have fallen afoul of India’s allergy to being lectured to. Reports suggest they have picked up a new head of steam, and one can only hope that this time it endures.
The case for India–EU cooperation could be strongly made, since the bulk of the problem areas in the world lie between India and Europe (or, as Sweden’s then Foreign Minister Carl Bildt once put it, between the Indus and the Nile). India’s security interests in Afghanistan and our increasing salience in the geopolitics of the Indian Ocean, especially in the security of the Gulf, the source of much of Europe’s energy, offer important intersections with Europe’s interests.
And yet the prospects for institutional cooperation between India and the EU—despite all that they have in common, the long history of contact between the Old Continent and the subcontinent, and the contemporary relevance of the challenges and opportunities they confront—remain negligible. India–EU relations currently lack substance and strategic weight. Though India was one of the first countries (in 1963) to establish diplomatic relations with the European Economic Community (EEC), and the India–EU Strategic Partnership and Joint Action Plan of 2005 and 2008 offer a framework for dialogue and cooperation in the field of security, it will take time for the EU to develop a common strategic culture, which is essential for meaningful strategic cooperation between the EU and India. The India–EU Joint Action Plan covers a wide range of fields for cooperation, including trade and commerce, security, and cultural and educational exchanges. However, as the Canadian diplomat David Malone has observed, ‘these measures lead mainly to dialogue, commitments to further dialogue, and exploratory committees and working groups, rather than to significant policy measures or economic breakthroughs.’
The oxymoronic lack of European unity in the European Union undermines the credibility of the collectivity. Since Maastricht in 1992, Europe has claimed to have a ‘common foreign policy’, but it is not a ‘single’ foreign policy. (If it were, EU member states would not need two of the five permanent seats on the UN Security Council, those of Britain and France, and be clamouring for a third, for Germany.)
India’s therefore prefers bilateral arrangements with individual member states of the EU, over dealing with the collectivity. New Delhi sees an affinity with London, Berlin or Paris that it cannot bring itself to imagine with Brussels or Strasbourg. It does not help that India also considers Europe with its multiplicity of complex organizations to be over-institutionalized and over-bureaucratized and, therefore, far more complicated and less attractive to engage with than national capitals.
It could also be argued that the EU provides very little value added to India’s principal security challenges. In the immediate priority areas of strategic interest to India—its own neighbourhood, the Gulf region, the United States and China—the EU is almost irrelevant, and the story does not get better if one extends India’s areas of security interest to Central and Southeast Asia. On the big global security issues—nuclear proliferation, civil conflict and terrorism—the problem is the same, while the EU has almost nothing to contribute to India’s search for energy security. Even in India’s quest to be part of the global decision-making architecture, including a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, it is not the EU but the existing European permanent members, the UK and France, and the aspirant, Germany, which bring more value to the table for India. India certainly needs European cooperation in counter-terrorism and European remote surveillance technology, but it would obtain these from European nation states —the Indo-French Working Group on Terrorism, for instance, has met every year since 2001— and not from the EU.
There certainly is, nonetheless, scope in the fields of food security, the response to climate change and the protection of the environment, where Europe could share with India its advances in ‘green technology’. In the sphere of science and technology, India’s participation in both the International Thermonuclear Reactor Project (ITER) and the GALILEO satellite programmes came through the EU. There is also room for enhanced technological cooperation, where India’s abundant and inexpensive scientifically savvy brainpower and its burgeoning record in ‘frugal innovation’ offer interesting synergies with Europe’s unmatched engineering traditions and capacity.
The recent differences between Europe and India over the Russian invasion of Ukraine have introduced complications into the relationship, though the Prime Minister and his European interlocutors have taken pains not to highlight the disagreements but to focus on the broader vision. Still, despite strong and uncontentious relations with individual European countries, the danger remains that Indians will write Europe off as a charming but irrelevant continent, ideal for a summer holiday but not for serious business, and that Europe might reciprocate by concluding that New Delhi is too chronically unable to wean itself off its old policies to be worth wooing. The world would be poorer if the Old Continent and the rising new subcontinent did not build on their democracy and their common interests to offer a genuine alternative partnership to the blandishments of both the United States and China.
***************
Prologue excerpt from Good Innings, by Shobha Tharoor Srinivasan,
May 10, 2022,
Indian Express.
For the last two years, as I write these words, my mother and I have been living together, as we had not done for any significant period since I went off to college at sixteen. It has been a revelation to me, and I daresay to her as well.
My mother has always relished her independence. Whether it was her insistence, into her eighties, to drive herself on frequent four-hour trips from Kochi, where she lived, to her tharavad veedu (ancestral home) in Palakkad district, or in her stubborn refusal to hire full-time domestic help, self-reliance was always my mother’s mantra. She doesn’t like depending on others’ help.
My sisters live abroad. My mother was living alone. For years, I begged and pleaded with her to move in with me, but she always declined. She would come to me for a few weeks at a time and get restless. The reason was simple: she liked being in control, enjoyed her routine, her neighbours. She didn’t want to compromise on her autonomy by adjusting herself to someone else’s home, someone else’s establishment, someone else’s environment. So, after a short while with me, almost never longer than a month, she would be off again to resume her own life.
From time to time, my mother would complain to my sisters and me that she felt lonely — but that had always been the case since my father, a larger-than-life dynamo, passed away more than a quarter of a century ago. When COVID struck and began to spread widely in India in mid-March 2020, I refused to let her leave for the airport at the end of a month-long stay in Delhi with me. That temporary change of plan has now become a permanent arrangement. A year after she got ‘stranded’, as she saw it, in Delhi, she tried to go back to her independent life in Kochi. Within a week, she realised she preferred to be with me. She has been back ever since, and she no longer talks of itching to return to her old life…
My mother’s real antidote to boredom is the Internet. She is a tireless emailer and browser of articles, which she forwards widely, and an addict of YouTube videos, which mercifully she has not yet learned to forward. She is active on WhatsApp and is unremitting when it comes to passing on morning greetings, trending videos and, occasionally, ‘fake news’. In her time, anything that appeared in print was reliable, and she extends the same credulity to what she reads or hears online. But, offline, her scepticism is her shield.
My mother and I have not always had the easiest of relationships. Which mother and son do? I know my personal and professional journeys have challenged her. And, as I know too well, she is a direct, no-nonsense woman. She can be charming if she wants, but generally doesn’t waste time on pleasantries. When others feel the whiplash of her tongue, I shrug apologetically: ‘Welcome to the club!’
Growing up, I often felt that nothing I did was good enough for my mother. She had the highest expectations of me, which meant she never allowed me the luxury of self-satisfaction. She rarely congratulated me on any of my prizes or distinctions; they were expected, nothing more…
My mother is multitalented but does not stay focused for long. She sings beautifully, but is untrained. A music director who heard her at a party once called her for an audition, but she chose an unwisely high-pitched song and, unused to the studio’s sound system, screeched herself out of a playback career. She has tried pottery and ceramics. Every visitor to my home is awestruck by a Ganesh she painted on glass in the Thanjavur style, and yet she has given up painting. I dedicated my 2001 novel, Riot, to her: ‘tireless seeker who taught me to value her divine discontent’.
Still, she can be determined when she has something to prove. After my father passed away, she single-handedly built a house in the Coimbatore suburbs, overcoming innumerable obstacles, and named it after her childhood home. Her point made — that she could do it — she sold it thereafter.
She disapproved of my entering politics, and prays regularly that I quit and return to what she sees as respectability. But she has queued up to vote for me each time, and when I faced a particularly tough race in 2014, she gamely climbed onto my campaign wagon to show her solidarity and support. She used to go on vacations with her now mainly octogenarian friends, annually pay tribute to Sathya Sai Baba’s Samadhi at Puttaparthi, and travel widely solo. That’s something she is determined to resume when COVID-era restrictions end. She has always embodied the principle that you are only as old as you allow yourself to feel.
As she confidently soldiers on in her mid-eighties, with two titanium knees, both eyes surgically freed of cataracts, but refusing to surrender to age, I feel an admiration welling up for her that I have rarely been able to express before. It has been compounded by a deep-seated revival of love for her that distance and difference had reduced to dormancy… I grew up thinking of my mother as critical and temperamental. But I failed to see the steel beneath signs of her insecurity, brought on by the ill-health of her husband. Her strength in coping with such an early bereavement, independence of mind and body, faith in herself and determination to face life on her own is an extraordinary lesson.
–> Copyright © 2021 Shashi Tharoor, All rights reserved.
My mailing address is:
97, Lodhi Estate, New Delhi 110 003.
Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list
This email was sent to gcmg17@gmail.com
why did I get this? unsubscribe from this list update subscription preferences
Shashi Tharoor · 97, Lodhi Estate, New Delhi 110 003 · New Delhi, 110003 · India
@media only screen and (max-width: 480px){ table#canspamBar td{font-size:14px !important;} table#canspamBar td a{display:block !important; margin-top:10px !important;} }