Why stop at Hindi?

The Budget should be translated into every Indian language

When Finance Minister Arun Jaitley presented the Union Budget to Parliament on Thursday, one aspect of his speech stood out: the fact that large sections of it were in Hindi. It was the first bilingual Budget presentation in recent times. Mr Jaitley’s predecessor, P Chidambaram, had been fond of ending his speeches with a quote from the Tamil language’s classical poet, Thiruvalluvar, but Mr Jaitley actually delivered substantive sections of the Budget in Hindi. Like many who speak Hindi with ease and idiomatically, Mr Jaitley stumbled over some sections of the Sanskritised Hindi of Indian official documents, but nevertheless, the point was made. It was underlined by the nature of the sections that were in Hindi. These were the most politically salient parts: reference to the Narendra Modi-led government’s most popular schemes, such as the one to provide free gas connections to poor rural women, that it hoped would be vote-winners in the future. 

Observers of Indian politics could take away multiple lessons from this bilingual experiment. First, it was clear that the Bharatiya Janata Party, to which Mr Jaitley belongs,  is more concerned about keeping its core voters in the Hindi heartland than in fighting off the narrative — that the BJP is a Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan party — which is increasingly salient in the southern and eastern states of India. Second, that Hindi is still not seen as the language of technocratic governance: all of the technical sections of the speech were in English. It must be a consolation to rural India in the non-Hindi speaking parts of the country that they were able to glean information about the government’s fiscal glide path — if, that is, they are capable of speaking English. Which, it is likely, not too many of them are. The Budget presentation was followed by a lengthy speech from the prime minister himself — again in Hindi. Mr Modi, of course, had collected many congratulations from nationalists for speaking in Hindi during his plenary address at the World Economic Forum in Davos. 

Some might carp that it is unseemly for Hindi to become so obviously the language of power in a country that is so very multilingual that it has close to two dozen official languages. But the growing political power of the north of the country — which, after all, put Mr Modi into office with an absolute majority — cannot be denied, whatever the risks to internal cohesion. Yet, perhaps Indian officialdom, which is fond of declaring that India is a continent-sized country as diverse as Europe, could learn something from, say, Europe. Bilingualism is inherently destabilising in a multilingual country. There are multiple stories — many of them no doubt apocryphal — about chief ministers from non-Hindi speaking states writing back in their own language to letters in Hindi from the central government. The southern states have increasingly organised themselves around the politics of language, a demon that some in the north thought had been laid to rest decades ago. There is no reason why the Union Budget should not also be in Hindi, apart from English. But equally, when it affects every state equally, there is no reason why the Budget should not be translated into every language, not just Hindi. In fact, this could even apply to every pronouncement of the Union. Organisations such as the European Union would fall apart if they did not give each language greater space. It is another matter that the EU, even without Britain, may well have leaders that speak to each other in English. Some might argue that India simply does not have enough number of translators. But, here surely is a solution to the employment problem?