Tamil Nadu says NOPE to the NEP

Settle for the New Training Coverage (NEP)—or else. That was the open risk that led Tamil Nadu chief minister M.Ok. Stalin to problem the pungent cost of ‘blackmail’.

Addressing the Kashi Tamil Sangamam in Varanasi, Union Training Minister Dharmender Pradhan declared that Tamil Nadu wouldn’t obtain funds below the Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) if it didn’t implement the NEP and its three-language components.

Outraged, all of the INDIA bloc events got here collectively to demand the Centre withdraw its risk, with hundreds gathering in Chennai on Tuesday, 18 February.

The Centre already owes Tamil Nadu Rs 2,152 crore below the SSA. Almost 40 lakh college students and 32,000 lecturers are affected by the cash being held up.

It has anyway been a longstanding grouse of the southern states that the tax revenues they contribute are allotted disproportionately, 12 months after 12 months, to laggard northern states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath’s brag concerning the state authorities spending Rs 7,500 crore for the Maha Kumbh Mela—with the Union authorities stated to have pitched in with an equal quantity—has solely rubbed it in. If UP has a lot cash, why starve the southern states of important funds?

The protests have been spearheaded by the ruling DMK, which has been locked in a dispute with the Centre over the NEP (launched in 2020). The state additionally opposes the draft UGC (College Grants Fee) guidelines that search to dilute the ability of states in regulating universities.

Deputy chief minister Udayanidhi Stalin categorically acknowledged that Tamil Nadu wouldn’t give up its rights and warned of one other ‘language warfare’ if withheld funds are usually not launched by the Centre. 

Senior DMK ministers together with schooling minister Anbil Mahesh and MP T.R. Baal have been current on the demonstration, together with alliance leaders from the MDMK [Vaiko], CPI, CPM and others. Chief after chief emphasised that the state would erupt in anger until the funds have been granted.

Rajya Sabha MP from Tamil Nadu and senior Congress chief P. Chidambaram stated Pradhan’s conceitedness revealed his ignorance of Tamil historical past and sentiment. ‘Formulating the state authorities’s language coverage is the suitable of the state’s individuals and it’s the proper of the state authorities. Does he know that solely one-language coverage is adopted in Hindi-speaking states?’ he wrote in a social media submit. How was it okay, chimed TN’s transport minister S.S. Sivasankar, that college students in Hindi-speaking states solely learnt one language, and non-Hindi talking states have been to be pressured to study three?

Chief minister Stalin, accusing the BJP of ‘coercion’ and ‘intimidation,’ stated this was simply the newest in a protracted record of provocations—the stepmotherly therapy of the state within the Union Finances, the continued obstructionism and hostility of Governor R.N. Ravi, and now the imposition of Hindi by means of the three-language coverage.  Whereas the Structure was amended to place schooling (initially a state topic) on the concurrent record, the chief minister wished to know which article of the Structure mandates a three-language coverage.

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The NEP’s three-language components—whereby college students study two regional languages, together with the state language, and English—doesn’t explicitly point out Hindi, however Tamil Nadu believes this can be a technique to thrust Hindi down the state’s throat. 

Anti-Hindi sentiment has a protracted historical past right here, going again to the Thirties, when the Justice Social gathering launched violent demonstrations in 1937-38 in opposition to the try to introduce Hindi in secondary faculties by C. Rajagopalachari, the Premier of Madras Province.

In his biography, The Rajaji Story his grandson Rajmohan Gandhi explains that the concept was to introduce Hindi to college students of lessons 6 and seven, with the stipulation that failure to cross wouldn’t block promotion. Rajaji most well-liked the time period ‘Hindustani’—to convey that Urdu phrases would even be included and the language may very well be learnt in both the Devanagari or the Arabic script.

E.V. Ramasamy Naicker, or Periyar as he’s higher recognized, the rationalist chief who fought in opposition to Brahminism, was on the forefront of the anti-Hindi agitation. The demonstrations took a violent flip after two arrested college students died in police custody. Rajaji was not swayed by public protests and refused to relent. Nevertheless, in 1939, Rajaji resigned and Madras Governor Lord Erskine withdrew the order a 12 months later.

The difficulty was vigorously debated within the Constituent Meeting, following which Hindi was adopted because the official language with English as an affiliate language for a interval of 15 years until 26 January 1965. (Jawaharlal Nehru introduced within the Official Languages Act of 1963 to permit the continuation of English as an affiliate language.) Many non-Hindi states opposed the imposition of Hindi, but it surely was in Tamil Nadu that it manifested itself in full power.

In 1963, the DMK launched its ‘direct motion’ demonstrations in opposition to Hindi. Social gathering founder C.N. Annadurai’s arrests (in ’63 and ‘65) and the immolation of two youth members of the DMK  on 27 January 1965 sparked off a collection of violent incidents. Police fired on riotous crowds resulting in casualties, and in a single horrific incident, a police sub-inspector was burned alive by a mob.

It was solely when Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri assured protesters that English would proceed for use as an affiliate official language indefinitely that the state of affairs calmed down. The DMK capitalised on the anti-Hindi agitation to return to energy within the 1967 elections, heralding a seamless period of Dravidian celebration rule within the state.

One of many first acts of the brand new DMK authorities headed by Annadurai was to promulgate a two-language components—Tamil and English—which continues to today.

Would possibly the Union schooling minister contemplate educating himself on the historic context that explains why Tamil Nadu finds the Centre’s insistence on the three-language coverage so exhausting to swallow?