New Delhi: Home Minister Amit Shah on Thursday called for making Hindi more flexible by accepting words from other Indian languages.
He was for making the national language an alternative to English and asked people of different states to mutually communicate in Hindi—not in English, The Indian Express reported.
Shah was reportedly speaking at the 37th meeting of the Parliamentary Official Language Committee, of which he is the chair.
The minister said that PM Narendra Modi had decided to make Hindi the medium of running the government, which would increase the language's importance, and it was about time to make Hindi an important part of the unity of the country. When citizens who speak different languages communicate, it should be in Hindi, he added.
The Home Minister stressed that elementary knowledge of Hindi be given to students up to Class IX, paying more attention to Hindi teaching examinations.
70 per cent of the agenda of the Cabinet is now prepared in Hindi, 22,000 Hindi teachers have been recruited in the eight states of the Northeast and nine tribal communities converted scripts of their dialects to Devanagari, he said.
These northeast states, according to him, would make Hindi compulsory up to Class X. India's culture and value systems remain protected primarily because of the language, he said. Speaking in 2019 on Hindi Diwas he effused about the idea of "One Nation, One Language".
As well as mentioning the importance of every language, he said that it was absloutly essential for the entire country to speak one language, becoming the identity of the nation.
And Hindi being the most spoken language in the country could tie the whole country in one thread, he added.
Opposition parties came down heavily on his statement at the time, with CPIM calling it an attack on the core principles of India's diversity. Congress leader Rajeev Gowda said that Article29 of the Constitution honoured multiple languages.
Shah has since toned down his advocacy of Hindi as well as, clarifying Hindi was not competing with any other regional language but merely complementing them.