I've nothing against English: Rajnath

A day after raising a storm by claiming that English had caused great damage to Sanskrit and Indian culture, BJP president Rajnath Singh said Saturday that he had nothing against learning English and expressions in that language.

The BJP president, writing on micro-blogging site Twitter, urged people to watch the video recording of his nearly 17-minute speech at Delhi's Constitution Club, during a function to highlight the importance of the cow. The subject matter of the function was: "Gai - Smruidhi Ka Aadhar" (Cow - The Basis of Prosperity).

The video recording has been uploaded on the internet by the BJP president. It goes with one line of introduction from Rajnath Singh: "I am not against learning or expressing in English language".

However, the recording has him saying quite clearly that English had greatly damaged the country.

"We are forgetting our religion and culture and now there are just 14,000 Sanskrit-speaking people in the country," Singh says.

In the video, the BJP president is seen questioning how, if so few people in the country knew Sanskrit, would knowledge of relgious texts, Vedas and Purans survive.

Although he says in the video that there was nothing wrong in learning or communicating in English, he adds that a problem arises when people get Anglicised and feel proud of carrying English books while travelling by air or train.