Navi Mumbai, Sept. 14 -- Union Home minister Amit Shah has said that India's linguistic diversity is its greatest strength and that the promotion of Hindi must go hand in hand with preservation and promotion of all Indian languages.
Delivering a speech on the occasion of Official Language Day, Shah said language was not only a means of communication but also the "memory of a society" and a reflection of identity, history and cultural traditions. He said Hindi had emerged as an important language of dialogue and coordination among people from different parts of the country.
Giving examples from Indian history, Shah said Swami Dayanand Saraswati, whose mother tongue was Gujarati, wrote Satyarth Prakash in Hindi, while Mahatma Gandhi set up the Dakshina Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha in 1918. He also recalled that Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose had adopted Hindi as a language of communication for the Azad Hind Fauj and had given the slogan "Jai Hind".
Shah said that the Constituent Assembly had adopted Hindi as the Official Language of the Union on September 14, 1949 but that Indian languages and cultural confidence had been driven to the margins by a colonial mindset.
He associated the promotion of Indian languages with the government's broader efforts towards decolonisation and cited the National Education Policy and the use of Indian languages in engineering, medical education and competitive examinations.
The minister also mentioned technological initiatives aimed at strengthening Indian languages, such as the AI-based 'Bharati' tool and the 'Hindi Shabd Sindhu' digital dictionary, which he said contained more than 8.27 lakh entries.
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Millennium Post.