By Ramachandran Rajeev Kumar — 2026-07-06

The Language Question: The War Nobody Can Win

Bharath Manthan - Episode 17

By Ramachandran Rajeev Kumar

Ninety years of agitation, and the only language that won is the one nobody was fighting for.

In May 2026, Tamil Nadu did something it had not done in fifty-nine years. It threw out the Dravidian parties. The DMK lost power. M.K. Stalin lost Kolathur, his own seat, three times won. An actor's two-year-old party formed the government.

And then the new government did something entirely familiar. Within days of taking office, it affirmed the two-language policy. Tamil and English. No third language. No compromise. The TVK government's words: Tamil Nadu will "remain steadfast, without any compromise" on the two-language policy.

Read that sequence again, because Delhi has not.

The electorate that ended a fifty-nine-year political era - that retired the very parties which built their identity on the anti-Hindi agitations - did not touch the language position those parties stood for. The parties were negotiable. The position was not.

This is the first lesson of the language question, and both sides keep failing it: language positions in India belong to peoples, not to parties. You cannot wait out a party. You cannot fund-starve a people.

Meanwhile, the Union government is withholding over Rs 3,500 crore in school education funds owed to Tamil Nadu for 2024-25 and 2025-26, because the state will not sign on to the three-language formula and the PM SHRI scheme. Money meant for classrooms, held hostage to a syllabus. Two years and counting. West Bengal and Kerala stand in the same queue.

Ninety years after the first anti-Hindi agitation, this is where we are: a Union government trying to purchase what it could not persuade, and states treating a schooling formula as a civilizational siege.

Both sides believe they are defending something sacred. Both sides are wasting India's time.

The Arithmetic of "National"

Start with a fact that surprises most Indians: India has no national language.

It never has. The Constitution names Hindi the official language of the Union - a working language for government business, alongside English, which was retained under the Official Languages Act of 1963 after Nehru's assurance to the southern states that English would continue as long as the non-Hindi states wanted it. Official, yes. National, no. The Gujarat High Court said as much in 2010, and nothing has changed since.

Now examine the claim that Hindi is the natural candidate. The 2011 census records 43.6% of Indians declaring Hindi their mother tongue. But that number is an accounting decision, not a linguistic fact. It folds in Bhojpuri - with roughly five crore speakers, more than the population of most European countries - along with Rajasthani, Chhattisgarhi, Magahi, and dozens of other tongues whose speakers were counted under the Hindi umbrella. Unbundle them, and the language spoken from Delhi's newsrooms is the mother tongue of just over a quarter of India.

A quarter is a plurality. It is not a nation.

The Eighth Schedule lists 22 languages. Several of them - Tamil, Bengali, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi - carry classical or centuries-deep literatures, film industries, and living political identities. No other democracy on Earth manages this density of major languages. The comparison everyone reaches for is Europe: and Europe, note, did not solve its language question by teaching everyone German.

We argued in Episode 2 that India's call is for unity, not uniformity. The language question is where that principle meets its hardest test - and where the uniformity temptation does its greatest damage.

The Chinese Mirage

There is a model in the world for unity through language, and its admirers in Delhi rarely name it out loud. It is China.

Beginning in the 1950s, the People's Republic standardized Putonghua - Mandarin - as the national tongue. Seventy years of compulsory schooling, migration, state media, and, where required, coercion have pushed Mandarin fluency past 80% of the population. Cantonese has been squeezed out of Guangdong classrooms. Mongolian-medium schooling in Inner Mongolia was curtailed in 2020 over public protest. In Tibet and Xinjiang, language policy is not education policy; it is security policy.

It would be dishonest to deny the result: China can command a single labour market, a single media sphere, a single administrative voice. Unity through language is not a fantasy. It is a real model with real returns.

It is also unavailable to India, for three reasons that no amount of political will can amend.

First, the starting material. China is 91% Han, standardizing dialects that mostly shared a script. India has no majority language, a dozen scripts, and literatures that predate the idea of India as a state. Mandarin absorbed cousins. Hindi would have to conquer strangers.

Second, the machinery. China's model required a one-party state willing to close schools, jail teachers, and wait out two generations of resentment. India is a federal democracy where language grievance does not simmer quietly - it wins elections. We have run this experiment. Compulsory Hindi, announced for Madras Presidency's schools in 1937, produced three years of agitation and was withdrawn by 1940. The 1965 switchover attempt produced riots that killed about seventy people by official counts - witnesses say more - and ended with Delhi retreating to Nehru's assurance. The three-language formula has been attempted, in some costume or another, since 1968. Tamil Nadu has refused it for fifty-eight years, under Congress chief ministers, DMK, AIADMK, and now TVK. The policy has outlived every party that proposed it and every party that opposed it.

Third, the point. China needed Mandarin because it had nothing else to standardize on. India already possesses a link language - one with global reach, no ethnic owner, and a seventy-year head start.

The Chinese model of ethnic unity through language will not work in India. Attempting a soft version of it - formula by formula, scheme by scheme, withheld crore by withheld crore - buys all of the resentment and none of the unity.

The Language That Won Without a Lobby

While Hindi and Tamil fought, English quietly won.

It won without a language movement, without a martyrs' memorial, without a single procession. It won because every Indian family that could afford a choice made the same one. Look at where the political class - of every party, in every state, on both sides of this dispute - sends its own children. English-medium schools. The politician who thunders against colonial languages at a rally has already settled the question at his breakfast table.

This is not elite betrayal. It is revealed preference, and the poor share it. The fastest-growing segment of Indian schooling for two decades has been low-cost private English-medium education in small towns. Parents earning daily wages pay fees they cannot spare for one word on a signboard: English-medium. They are not sentimental about Macaulay. They are rational about ladders.

The rationality is measurable. The benchmark study of English and Indian wages - by World Bank and university economists, using national household survey data - found men fluent in English earn 34% more per hour than comparable workers with none, and even a little English is worth 13%. English is the operating language of the higher judiciary, of scientific publication, of the IT industry that made Bangalore a world city, and of the diaspora whose success we celebrated earlier in this series. When a Tamil engineer works with a Punjabi manager for a German client, the meeting is not conducted in anyone's mother tongue.

Here is the irony history has handed us: the one language in India with no community to offend is the one language every community accepts. Hindi belongs to someone, and therefore threatens someone. English belongs to no one, and therefore serves everyone. It is nobody's mother tongue and everybody's ladder.

The common language of India is not Hindi. It is English. This is not a preference. It is a description.

The Market Is Already Deciding

Step away from the legislatures and watch what Indians actually do.

Lakhs of workers from Bihar, Jharkhand, and Uttar Pradesh now live in Tamil Nadu and Kerala - in Tiruppur's garment units, Kochi's construction sites, Coimbatore's foundries. No circular ordered them to learn Tamil or Malayalam; the shop floor did. Kerala runs literacy programmes teaching Malayalam to migrant workers. Tamil shopkeepers have picked up working Hindi in return, not because the NEP asked, but because the customer speaks it.

In the other direction, southern students sign up for Hindi when it serves them - the Dakshina Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha, founded by Gandhi in Madras of all places, has taught Hindi to southerners voluntarily for a century. Andhra parents choose Hindi as a third subject where it helps their children's mobility. Nobody riots over a choice.

Language follows opportunity. It always has. Persian ruled India's courts for five centuries not because Indians loved Persia but because that was where the jobs were; it vanished within a generation when the jobs moved. No language in Indian history has ever been successfully imposed against opportunity, and none has ever needed imposition when opportunity favoured it.

This is what makes the current standoff so wasteful. The Union is spending political capital - and Rs 3,500 crore of schoolchildren's money - to mandate what migration and markets are already negotiating, gracefully, on their own.

What Choice Would Look Like

So let the student choose. That is the entire reform.

English as the common base. Not by decree - by recognition of what seventy years of Indian behaviour has already decided. Every Indian child gets a genuine command of English, the language of her courts, her sciences, and her opportunities. On this, ironically, Chennai and Delhi's elites already agree in private. Let them agree in public.

The mother tongue as the foundation. Early learning in the child's own language is the one point where the NEP's research is sound and Tamil Nadu's practice already complies. Nobody serious disputes it.

Everything else - a choice. Hindi for the Coimbatore student eyeing a Delhi career. German or Japanese or Mandarin for the Chennai student eyeing the world. Sanskrit for the scholar, Telugu for the neighbour. Offered, funded, never mandated.

And honesty requires saying the harder half aloud: choice cuts both ways. A Tamil student who wants Hindi should find it in her school as easily as one who does not should be free of it. A two-language mandate that forbids is the mirror image of a three-language mandate that forces. Tamil Nadu's position is constitutionally sound - education is a shared responsibility, and the state's record on schooling outcomes speaks for itself - but a policy born as a shield for choice should not calcify into a cage for it. If the Union must not thrust, the state must not bar.

As for Delhi: release the money. Today. Linking Samagra Shiksha funds to a language formula is not policy; it is a siege of classrooms, and it converts a pedagogical debate into a test of Tamil honour that no Chennai government - DMK, AIADMK, or TVK - can ever afford to fail. Ninety years of evidence says the pressure produces the opposite of its intent. A Union that cannot learn from ninety years of its own experiments has a bigger education problem than any state.

The Lesson

The churning this episode surfaces is a simple one, and it has been sitting in plain sight since 1937: India's unity was never linguistic, and it never needed to be.

Rome's empire spoke Greek in the east and never suffered for it. India's civilization carried its ideas across Asia in Pali, Sanskrit, Tamil, and translation, and never demanded a single tongue of anyone. The idea that a nation requires one language is a nineteenth-century European import - the same intellectual crate that brought us "one people, one state" and the century of blood that followed it. China chose that road and paid its price in coercion. India cannot pay that price, and - here is the point both Delhi and the language warriors miss - India does not need the product.

We have held together 22 scheduled languages, a dozen scripts, and 1.4 billion people under one Constitution for nearly eighty years. The glue was never vocabulary. It was civilization, family, federation - and, for the practical business of talking to each other, a borrowed language we quietly made our own.

The student in Madurai and the student in Meerut do not need the same second language. They need the same thing every Indian student needs: her own tongue, the world's tongue, and the freedom to add any other she pleases.

Ninety years is long enough for one argument. The answer was on the signboard of every small-town school all along.

Let the child choose. She already has.

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The author is Founder & Editor-in-Chief of BarathVector.