Demand to declare 22 languages as official languages of India

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi was making his Independence Day speech in Hindi on Saturday, hundreds of tech-savvy Indians took to Twitter to protest against how the Central governments have historically privileged Hindi over other Indian languages, by sending out pointed tweets criticising what they alleged as India’s flawed language policy.

This campaign was organised by members of Facebook advocacy group, Promote Linguistic Equality, to protest and raise awareness of how non-Hindi States are often coerced into using Hindi. For several hours on Saturday, #StopHindiImposition was a trending topic in many of the non-Hindi cities.

Asked why Independence Day was hand-picked to organise this protest, Prasanna LM, a main organiser of the campaign and a student, said, “We felt that August 15 would be the best day to highlight the fact that Indians can enjoy true independence only when all Indians and their languages are given equal status. Otherwise, non-Hindi speakers will remain as second class citizens. We demand that all 22 languages of union be declared as official languages under the 8th Schedule of the Constitution,” he said.

The campaign had the participation of hundreds of social media users who share the same demand.

Speaking about how the campaign was organised, Vishal V Navekar said, “We prepared a database of tweets in different languages and asked our members to tweet them using the hashtag #StopHindiImposition,” he said.

The Twitterati also kick-started a debate on issues faced by non-Hindi speakers.