NEW DELHI — Please mark the answer that best represents the truth (as this is not to ascertain your ideology, but your aptitude for a job with great perks).

English is a foreign language.

A) True. It came from outside India.

B) False. The former prime minister Manmohan Singh and the former deputy prime minister L.K. Advani also came from elsewhere, but they are Indian now. A language belongs where it lives.

C) True. English is foreign because it is not the mother tongue of the vast majority of Indians.

D) False. English is in fact India’s only national language, far more influential than even Hindi.

E) All of the above.

This question has yet to appear in any objective-type exam, but it has long bothered Indian society and is at the heart of a protest by hundreds of young Indians who are objecting to, among other things, the intrusion of English in one of India’s most prestigious tests — the civil services examination. To be precise, they are protesting one of the two screening tests that hundreds of thousands take every year to qualify for the “main” exams. Only a few hundred survive, to be inducted into a system that may eventually take them to the top levels of bureaucracy.