India: Bureaucracy by Doublespeak

Troops in red turbans and elephants in gold caparisons march through New Delhi this week. The occasion is Republic Day, commemorating India's 15th independence anniversary. Also ushered in by the date is another event less loudly cheered: the formal designation of Hindi as India's official language.

In a land whose 470 million inhabitants speak 14 major tongues and 831 dialects, the language of the elite, ever since the British raj, has been English. Both Parliament and the executive branch of the government conduct their affairs in English, which is the only etymological link among all sectors of the Indian populace. In 1963, however, Parliament decreed the official language to be Hindi, effective Republic Day, 1965. Though English will continue as an "associate language," all official documents must henceforth be in Hindi, even if they have to be accompanied by English translations for the benefit of recipients.

"Hindi Imperialism." Though spoken by more Indians than any other language, Hindi covers less than half the populace and is the mother tongue of only four states—Bihar, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh (Nehru's as well as Prime Minister Shastri's home). The officialization of Hindi has long been fought by non-Hindi regions, chiefly four southern states to which Hindi is as foreign as Tex-Mex; they are Madras (which speaks Tamil), Andhra Pradesh (Telu-gu), Kerala (Malayalam) and Mysore (Kannada). Anti-Hindis accuse the Hindis of being out for political gain. In any case, should Hindi become the exclusive official tongue, thousands of civil servants, who do not understand Hindi but get government clerical jobs through their knowledge of English, would be totally adrift.

Fortnight ago, an anti-Hindi rally in Madras denounced the "imposition of Hindi" as "discriminatory tyranny." Other southerners even charged "Hindi imperialism," and a Madras political party planned to spend Republic Day in mourning. Last week in Bengali-speaking West Bengal, trucks bearing license plates in Hindi were ordered off roads on the plea that cops were unable to read them—obviously a deliberate and calculated harassment of Hindistate shipping.

Desk Piles. To spread Hindi, the government is spending $2,100,000 this year. Committees have been appointed to translate legal and technical terminology into Hindi, a task complicated by the fact that one English term often comes out as a cumbersome and exotic train of several Hindi words ("telephone exchange," translated literally into Hindi, is "house of the distant voices"). Such bureaucracy by doublespeak is hardly apt to speed India's snail-slow governmental machinery, which at a time of increasing national difficulties needs just the opposite. Desks of West Bengal bureaucrats are already piled high with letters from opposite numbers in Uttar Pradesh, which they cannot read, much less answer, since the senders in dutiful obedience to the new law failed to attach English translations.