India is in the midst of yet another language war with the southern states up in arms accusing the federal government of using covert means to impose Hindi.

To the uninitiated, Hindi is not a pan-Indian language and such protests are not new.

The official data shows that Hindi — as defined by the federal government that bunched a bouquet of North Indian languages, all bracketed under Hindi — is spoken by 42 per cent of the approximately 1.4 billion people.

A popular misconception is that Hindi is India’s national language. Instead, it is only one of the 22 languages mentioned in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution. However Hindi, along with English, are the official languages of the federal government.

The states have their respective language and English as official languages.

Even while opposing its imposition, all political parties even in the non-Hindi speaking South accept the organic growth of Hindi, popularised by Bollywood movies and live broadcast of cricket since the early 1980s.

The battle against protecting the much older South Indian languages against Hindi imposition goes back to the 1930s, over a decade before India became independent in 1947.

The prime minister of the Madras Presidency (British nomenclatures of the colonial times) C Rajagopalachari chose to make Hindi mandatory in schools in the province that comprises today’s state of Tamilnadu, northern parts of Kerala, parts Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Odisha states.

But faced with strident opposition Rajagopalachari not only dropped his idea, but changed his views radically. In 1950 he prescribed English as the second language to Tamil in Tamilnadu, and not Hindi.

Several North Indian leaders despised English — the ‘colonial’ language. But by then the educated elites across the country had come to realise the benefits of English over Hindi.

The federal government’s attempts to push Hindi in non-Hindi states didn’t end there. In 1965 the then prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri of the Indian National Congress reignited the Hindi issue by proposing to make it the language communication between states.

This meant non-Hindi states, where the language was not understood, would have to switch from English to Hindi, at the cost of their own immensely rich native languages.

Tamilnadu had then witnessed massive protests leading to the eventual rejection of the Congress party in the state, which is the hub of the Dravidian civilisation as opposed to the more Aryan north.

It gave rise to Dravidian politics in Tamilnadu, which two Dravidian parties ruled interchangingly since 1967. A year later prime minister Shastri launched the three-language policy to make sure all states teach their students Hindi, along with the respective state language and English.

But Tamilnadu refused and instead stuck to its two-language formula of Tamil and English. Only schools that follow one or the other national curricula offer Hindi as a language in the state.

The fuel for the latest language war being waged by South Indian states was provided by the federal government denying its share of funding to states if they failed to implement the three-language policy under its contentious National Education Policy (NEP).

The non-BJP governments in the states see the NEP as an instrument to further the communal agenda of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party that heads the federal coalition. The BJP-led government rubbished such allegations and insisted that states are free to teach any third language and it doesn’t force anyone to learn Hindi.

But the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam that rules Tamilnadu and its chief minister MK Stalin argue that there is no need for a third language as the state offers higher quality education with Tamil and English alone.

India is unique as a country that speaks multiple languages, often different languages in each state. The Congress has always focused on the ‘Unity in Diversity’ mantra, although the party’s governments had quietly imposed Hindi via the three-language policy, watered down the federal principles by depriving the states of several of their powers and often dismissed state governments at will.

But ties between the federal government and with the states worsened with the Hindu nationalist BJP under Prime Minister Narendra Modi elected to power in 2014. The BJP government is accused of making sweeping changes to the very character of the federal system by doing everything in its power to homogenise and centralise, rather than de-centralising and maintaining the diversity.

The BJP is accused of nursing its ‘One nation, One language’ policy. Federal home (interior) minister Amit Shah had earlier kicked up a massive row by saying that Hindi should henceforth be used instead of English.

But amid the ongoing tussle, Shah changed his position and said the federal government would communicate in the languages of the respective states starting December 2025. This, however, is seen as a tactic to sideline English.

The South Indian states have for long maintained that English can be the only link language in India.

English has always been the language of the judiciary, interstate communications and a key driver of India’s prowess in Information Technology. Although often dubbed as a British colonial leftover, English has all along enabled Indian professionals to quickly integrate in various countries, while Hindi has not gained acceptance even across India.

Stalin warned that accepting Hindi would kill the much older Indian languages, just like it happened in the northern states. The older North Indian languages like Maithili, Awadhi, Bhojpuri are among the tens of local languages that are now being described as dialects of Hindi, while Hindi itself is an amalgam of all these languages apart from Sanskrit and Urdu.

A more pertinent argument put forth by South Indian states is that Hindi has not served even Hindi-speaking states for 75 years since Independence.

They point out that the South Indian states that speak at least four different main languages and over forty dialects, have progressed to become the richest region with high per capita income, high rates of human development indices in education and healthcare. On the contrary, they say, the Hindi-speaking states in the North are the most backward. Hence, they question the rationale of imposing Hindi on them.

The language war has taken different dimensions in South India over the decades. The state of Karnataka — where the people speak Kannada — had witnessed frequent anti-Hindi agitations.

Anti-Hindi activists had in 2017 forced the metro train service provider of Bengaluru to remove Hindi from all signboards, retaining only Kannada and English.

A former chief minister of Karnataka, and a current minister in Modi’s government, HD Kumaraswamy had been a staunch opponent of celebrating the annual ‘Hindi Day’ by using taxpayer’s money.

The Modi government’s diktat to install Hindi plaques for centrally sponsored schemes in various states had also come under fire. The Communist-ruled southern state, Kerala was in the forefront of refusing to install Hindi plaques.

While organic growth is one thing, the southern states are bent on resisting imposition of Hindi on them.