Indian English

A few days ago Mulayam Singh Yadav, the erstwhile Chief Minister of India's biggest state Uttar Pradesh, dropped a veritable bombshell when he said that English needs to be banned from Parliament in order to promote Hindi.Now Yadav was gently reminded that India is a multicultural diverse nation, where different languages are spoken and understood, he responded that Indian languages could be allowed in Parliament but not English. This stand, former and latter, has left most sensible people flummoxed.Indian English is as Indian as is say Hindi, Marathi or Kannada and is the language in which most business gets done.In villages in Karnataka there has been a steady rise of children enrolling in private English medium schools. How come they see something that Yadav has missed? Companies that I have seen transact their business in English and hence select through an English interview process and there is no escaping that fact. The interesting point is, why revive old ghosts? The Hindi bogey was considered dead and buried and most non Hindi speakers muddled their way through a Bollywood movie and listened in rapt attention to Lata Mangeshkar or Kishore Kumar ( both incidentally are not from the Hindi heartland )without understanding a word. English in India is still considered the language of the elite and rich and politicians can hobnob with the rich but cannot be seen to be doing so.Both SM Krishna in Karnataka and Chandrababu Naidu in Andhra Pradesh lost elections as they were considered to be pro rich/anti poor and pro urbanization. The Hindi debate was settled long ago and we need to navigate around it rather than running aground on a non- issue. India has greater things to contend with in both the near and far terms and we do not need another language row.