NEW DELHI: This is one IITian who will not fit into your mainstream aspirational narrative. He has a dream alright, but one that runs counter to what we have come to associate with the IIT types.Meet Mukesh Kumar Jain, 52, alumnus of IIT-Roorkee, also one of the driving forces behind the agitation against the new CSAT format for civil service exams. Jain is chief patron of the Akhil Bharatiya Angrezi Anivarya Virodhi Manch, an organisation that’s devoted to wiping out English from the country, and installing Hindi in its place, north or south.The Manch operates out of the Hindu Mahasabha Office near the historic Birla Mandir complex in the national capital. The office too boasts of a bit of history, having hosted one of the earliest RSS shakhas, and a certain Nathuram Vinayak Godse once graced its rooms, informs one of Jain’s volunteers. Since 1986, be it the IIT-JEE exam, the NDA-CDS entrance, bank exams, or tests held by PSUs, Jain and protests for changing the language of the exams from English to Hindi.Sitting in a room adjacent to a Veer Savarkar statue at the office, Jain, a metallurgical engineer from the 1984 batch at Roorkee — the 168-year-old institution was upgraded to an IIT in 2001 — recalls that as a student, he had a tough time convincing authorities to let him write his exams in Hindi. “It was not because I didn’t know English, but because I consider it humiliating that English should be a medium to test our knowledge,” said Jain, who also runs a manufacturing firm in the city.“Students made fun of me but I told them they are betraying our motherland by looking West. We have to learn from China, Germany and France that respecting our languages is the way forward,” said Jain.Jain says his first success came when violent agitations in the IIT-Kanpur campus forced the institute to issue forms in Hindi in 1986. “We had started burning their English question papers a year before, after which they relented.” His anti-English activities have only scaled up since then, and, in fact, found support from several right-wing Hindu outfits. His 1,200-odd cadres based mostly in Delhi and UP in the past two months fanned out in the villages of the Hindi heartland, moving from one coaching centre to the other “educating” students against the need to agitate against the “Christian conspiracy” to impose English.“Unlike Muslims who only loot, the Christians manipulate our brains and rob us of our national identity slowly using their educational institutions,” he says.In his office, Jain is surrounded by various books the group has published over the years — mostly on the “threat” of Christian conversions in India. ‘ Anna Hazare ka Isai Aatank’, ‘Deshdrohi Kejriwal’, ‘Yesu Main Shaitan Hai’, ‘Indian Bureaucracy Under Christian Siege’ are just some of his several quickread books that are widely distributed during the Manch’s agitations “Many of our members got injured when the police acted tough (during the anti-CSAT protests). All this is part of Sonia Gandhi’s Christian terrorism. Now under Modi’s Hindu-Hindi-Hindustan approach, her tactics won’t work,” Jain says.Not everyone agrees. Other organisations that have been at the forefront of the anti-CSAT protests say outfits such as the Manch that made the UPSC agitation a nationalist and a language issue have only done disservice to the cause. “There were several volunteers from Hindu organisations who made it an issue of ‘self-respect’. By making it an only ‘No-English’ debate, the original cause of bring non-science students on par with others got lost,” says Sant Prakash, one of the leaders of the agitation.