MK Stalin did not mince words. A “propaganda tool for Hindi imposition”, is how the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Stalin described the switch to Hindi by the State-run insurer Life Insurance Corporation of India or LIC on its website on Tuesday, demanding an “immediate rollback of this linguistic tyranny”.
“The LIC website has been reduced to a propaganda tool for Hindi imposition. Even the option to select English is displayed in Hindi. The LIC website has been reduced to a propaganda tool for Hindi imposition. Even the option to select English is displayed in Hindi,” complained Mr Stalin on X.
“We demand an immediate rollback of this linguistic tyranny,” he said.
Recently, in October, Chief Minister MK Stalin had posed a series of questions to Governor RN Ravi regarding a missing line from Tamil Nadu’s state anthem during its rendition in an event. Mr Stalin criticised the Governor for “vilifying the Dravidian race” and trying to “impose Hindi everywhere”.
Tamil Nadu has a long history of anti-Hindi agitation dating back to the 1930s. The massive protests against Hindi imposition in the 1960s had catapulted Mr Stalin’s party, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), to power. The then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had assured continuing English as a link language as long as non-Hindi-speaking states accept Hindi.
The state has also been vehemently opposing the three-language formula as part of the new education policy, which would require students to learn Hindi as a third language.
Last year in March, a directive from India’s food safety authority to rename curd packets as “Dahi” in Hindi was changed after it sparked a backlash from Tamil Nadu’s Chief Minister and milk producers, who saw it as an attempt to impose Hindi on non-Hindi speaking states.
