'Language War' Roils Coming Provincial Polls in India's South

Scheme to impose Hindi in Tamil Nadu a growing political issue

By: Nirupama Subramanian

Photo from PTI

A simmering political row over the Narendra Modi government's alleged scheme to impose Hindi, the language spoken in most of North India, in the opposition-ruled south Indian state of Tamil Nadu where people speak mainly Tamil, is threatening to resurrect old strains in the country's federal model.

The “language war” is likely the stage setter for a south vs north battle that could dominate next year's provincial elections in Tamil Nadu, a state at the southern extreme of the country where the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has yet failed to make a mark.

On Saturday, a top member of the Tamil Nadu Bharatiya Janata Party who serves as the governor of another state – the federal government hands out the ceremonial position to senior loyalists – said secessionism is “still alive” in some states, citing the southern state as an example.

That was the second time in a week that a ruling party official was making the allegation. When the state government presented its budget on March 15, it caused a stir by using the Tamil alphabet to denote the Indian currency instead of the national rupee symbol. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman alleged then that the ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK)'s action “promotes secessionist sentiment.”

Elections to the Tamil Nadu State legislature are due in 2026. The ruling DMK, a regional party, anticipates a tough fight from the BJP, which is desperate to break into Tamil Nadu. With still a year to go, the campaign has begun unusually early. The BJP is perceived in southern India as a party that does not respect the cultural, linguistic, and religious diversity of India in its quest for a homogenized “Hindu-Hindi” India.

All Indian federal governments have had a centralizing impulse, but the BJP has done this more aggressively, giving it a cultural edge as well. As it gears to battle for a second successive term, the signal from the regional party is that it is prepared to play up language and cultural identity, melding these with the concern that a planned exercise to redraw constituencies across the country will reduce the state's representation in parliament.

Tamil Nadu's anti-Hindi politics have a long history, predating India's independence from British colonial rule. The roots lie in a movement against the Brahmin domination of the Congress party, which led to the freedom struggle. At the time, Mahatma Gandhi asked south Indians to learn Hindi for better integration with north India. The Justice Party, the initial vehicle of the anti-Brahmin/anti-Congress movement, opposed it, making the case that as Hindi was closely linked to Sanskrit, it was a move to entrench Brahminism in the south. Later, the Justice Party renamed itself Dravida Kazhagam. Literally, it means the party of Dravidians, a reference to the Dravidian people of the south, who claim greater antiquity to the land than the people of the north.

In the years leading to India's independence and partition, the JP/DK canvassed for an independent “Dravidastan” or Dravida Nadu, comprised of what are now the five southern states of India – Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Kerala, and Karnataka – against the perceived economic, political, linguistic, and cultural domination of the south by North India. The cry was taken up by the DMK, which grew out of the DK.

Unlike Sri Lanka's Tamil militant separatism, the DMK's remained a political demand. The issue lost steam when India reorganized the states along linguistic lines in 1956, and the DMK buried the demand formally when, in the wake of the 1962 war with China, the Nehru government enacted an amendment to the Constitution that required members of parliament to swear allegiance to the sovereignty and territorial integrity.

But the opposition to Hindi continued, with the DMK leading a violent protest in 1965 in what was then a Congress-ruled state. Two years later, the DMK won office for the first time, trouncing the Congress comprehensively. Though power has shifted between the DMK and its breakaway AIADMK, no national party has been able to capture power in the state since then.

This is the regional stronghold that the BJP wants to storm. Usually the first to set the terms of election campaigns, this time the BJP, no wallflower itself when it comes to identity politics, seems frazzled by the DMK's language gambit.

The DMK's allegation that a school education policy framed by the federal government seeks to force students in Tamil Nadu's state schools to learn Hindi has found resonance in four other opposition-ruled southern states, each with its own distinctive language. The BJP denies the allegation but has made no secret of its belief that Hindi ought to be the national language.

Many Indians remain unaware that India has no national language. Due to the strong opposition to Hindi as a national language, the Constitution first made Hindi an “official” federal government language, permitting the use of English too for a period of 15 years. It was when that cut-off date approached that Tamil Nadu was convulsed by anti-Hindi riots.

After that bruising episode, the federal government didn’t push for the countrywide adoption of Hindi, which remains an official language along with English and 20 other official ones. State governments may adopt the local language as their official language. States may communicate with each other and the federal government in English.

However, the BJP's decision to give Hindi names to the Indian Penal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure was a warning of the creeping Hindi-ization of the country. The adoption of a Sanskrit-heavy Hindi in officialese is another pointer.

On March 22, Tamil Nadu chief minister M K Stalin also convened a meeting of opposition parties to discuss the “delimitation threat,” a separate but related issue that is roiling the southern states. The federal government is set on a delimitation exercise ahead of the 2029 elections. The southern states, where population growth has slowed, fear a reduction in their number of Lok Sabha seats, and an increase of seats in the northern states, thus skewing the north-south representation in the country's parliament.

The refrain is that the southern states are being punished for better policies, and that the northern states are getting away with their bad behavior. Amit Shah, the federal home minister and Modi's right hand man, has refuted the allegation, and accused the DMK of raking up the delimitation and language issues to cover up its own “inefficiency” and “corruption.”

Southern states also chafe at tiny financial allocations from the federal government, compared to the amount of tax revenue they must send to the center. According to one calculation presented in parliament in 2024 by a DMK member, for every rupee Tamil Nadu gives to Delhi, it gets back only 29 paise, but an underdeveloped state like Uttar Pradesh gets back Rs 2.73.

Modi and Shah have dismissed the South vs North as an artificial creation by dynastic regional politicians and parties that want to demonize the BJP in Tamil Nadu. Artificial or not, the rhetoric around this divide appears set to grow over the coming months as the state goes into election mode.