‘India’s Many Languages Are Not Its Weakness’, Rahul Gandhi Makes Veiled Attack on Amit Shah’s Hindi Push

Amit Shah had asserted that a common language would become “the mark of India’s global identity

Updated: September 16, 2019 10:09 PM IST

By India.com News Desk | Edited by Surabhi Shaurya

Rahul Gandhi on Citizenship Amendment Bill
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi

New Delhi: Former Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Monday made a veiled attack on Union Home Minister Amit Shah over his ‘one nation, one language’ call. Taking to micro-blogging site Twitter, Gandhi posted several languages spoken in India including Nepali with the national flag emojis and wrote,”India’s many languages are not her weakness”.

His tweet was liked over 30,000 times and was retweeted by 89000 users at the time of filing the story.

Notably, a couple of days ago, Shah had asserted that a common language would become “the mark of India’s global identity”.  On the occasion of Hindi Diwas on September 14, Home Minister had stressed that India needs a national language so it has a place amid the foreign languages. He emphasised that the Hindi language has that stronghold and capability in our nation and hence it was envisioned as the ‘Raj Bhasha’ by the freedom fighters.

Several politicians including BS Yediyurappa, Bharatiya Janata Party’s one of the biggest leaders in South India had opposed Shah’s pitch. “All official languages in our country are equal. However, as far as Karnataka is concerned, Kannada is the principal language. We will never compromise its importance and are committed to promote Kannada and our state’s culture”, Yediyurappa had tweeted earlier in the day.

Besides, actor-turned-politician Kamal Haasan had opposed the idea of one nation, one language. “No Shah, Sultan or Samrat can suddenly break that promise. We respect all languages but our mother language will always be Tamil. Jallikattu was just a protest. The battle for our language will be exponentially bigger than that,” Haasan said in a video message.

“Most of the Nation happily sings their National Anthem in Bengali with pride and will continue to do so. The reason is the poet who wrote the National Anthem gave due respect to all languages and culture within the Anthem. And hence, it became our Anthem,” he added.

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