On July 1, 2017, when the phase 1 network of the Bangalore metro rail network was inaugurated, there was great jubilation within the citizenry because the new line enables the city’s growing community of commuters to change trains at two nodal junctions and proceed in other directions as is normative in all underground trains around the world. The first metro line inaugurated in October 2011 plied only in a linear direction. 

However, the decision of the Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation Ltd (BMRCL), a joint venture between the Central and state government, to designate all metro stations and signposting under the three-language formula — English, Hindi and Kannada — aroused the ire of the Karnataka Rakshana Vedhike (KRV or Karnataka Protection Forum), providing it an opportunity to revive its campaign of primacy for Kannada, the state’s primary language. Although the first metro line also sported three language signposting, at that time the KRV’s protests were muted by the celebrations. This time however, with the BJP in power at the Centre covertly and overtly pushing Hindi as the national language — which prompted a veiled threat from Tamil Nadu’s leader M.K. Stalin in April that 1965 (when ‘anti-Hindi imperialism’ protests rocked Tamil Nadu resulting in secession threats and several immolation deaths) could be repeated again — the KRV mounted a strident protest against the three-language posting of the Bangalore metro and masked the Hindi signage at several metro stations. Reacting swiftly, chief minister K. Siddaramaiah directed BMRCL to remove Hindi from the metro signage, an order which the organisation’s management has complied with.

Anger against renewed attempts by BJP hardliners and even prime minister Narendra Modi and cabinet ministers to impose Hindi as the national language is back on the boil, especially in the non-BJP states of peninsular India. Therefore it came as no surprise that on September 15, the Karnataka Knowledge Commission submitted a report to the state government to scrap the three-language formula in schools. 

However unsurprisingly, the Knowledge Commission presumably under pressure from subnationalist KRV language chauvinists went to the other extreme. Despite a Supreme Court judgement of May 2014, which ruled that parents have the right to choose the medium of instruction of their children, the commission recommended that classes I-V in all schools in the state must have Kannada as the medium of instruction and English as the second language. Members of the commission seem to have forgotten that the state government had made it mandatory for all schools constructed after 1994 to teach children in classes I-V with Kannada as the medium of instruction. After an epic courtroom battle in Associated Managements of (Govt. Recognised Unaided English Medium) Primary and Secondary Schools in Karnataka (KAMS) vs. State of Karnataka & Ors (writ petition No. 14363/1994), the Supreme Court struck down this government order in 2014. But this hasn’t deterred KRV language chauvinists from continuing to demand Kannada as the compulsory medium of education in classes I-VII. Therefore the metro signage has come as a godsend to them to resurrect the issue, though this time they have joined Hindi bashers. 

Meanwhile, the subtle attempts of the BJP to revive the three-language formula proposed in the 1950s, under which all states would ensure that students learn English, Hindi and the state language, has been given a quiet burial in the southern states. Tamil Nadu abolished teaching-learning of Hindi way back in 1968 with students obliged to learn only English and Tamil and any other language of their choice voluntarily. Now Karnataka is likely to follow suit. 

Comments Mansoor Khan, the promoter-director of four CBSE affiliated DPS schools in Bangalore: “Currently we follow the three-language formula with English as the medium of instruction and Hindi and Kannada as compulsory languages in primary classes. In secondary schools children have the option of learning a second language of their choice. But this may have to change if the state government insists that Kannada will have to be taught until class X or XII,” says Khan. 

In its anxiety to overtly and covertly impose Hindi as the national language — as manifested in its anxiety to write all signage in Bangalore’s new metro rail in Hindi — the BJP government at the Centre has clearly overplayed its hand. With most of the younger generation content with using English — the global language of business — as the national language and the state language for informal conversational usage, the three language formula which included Hindi is dead in peninsular India, if not elsewhere. 

Arathi M (Bangalore)