Congress Member of Parliament (MP) Shashi Tharoor said that Hindi is not our national language and that it should not be imposed on anyone. He made this statement in a Facebook post on Saturday, only a few hours after Union Minister and Bhartiya Janta Party leader Venkaiah Naidu laid stress on the importance of learning Hindi.
In his Facebook post, Tharoor said:
Hindi is not our national language. It is India’s most widely-spoken language and useful to know. But it cannot and should not be imposed on anyone.
Even after 24 hours of Tharoor posting this, there were all sorts of and thousands of reactions coming in from people.
Someone said that learning Hindi is just a waste of time and people should instead focus on learning English which is spoken not only across the country but all over the world.
Another user said that imposing anything on anyone is wrong, be it language, food, culture or anything else.
On the other hand, there were some people who slammed Shashi Tharoor hard and said that he is opposing the idea of promoting Hindi only because it is put forward by a leader of BJP.
Congress leader Shashi Tharoor ShashiTharoor.in
Here are some more reactions to Tharoor’s post:
Earlier during the day, Naidu had said that Hindi is the most widely spoken language in India and stressed on the popularization of our country’s ‘matribhasha’.
While speaking at an event in Sabarmati Ashram, Naidu also highlighted that in India, too much importance is accorded to English. The minister also said that learning Hindi is important but we should also be fluent in our mother language such as Marathi, Gujarati, Bhojpuri etc.
Meanwhile, on Friday, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj said that the passports will now be bilingual, with text written in both English and Hindi.
