NEW DELHI: Almost all opposition parties supported a bill to accord central university status to three Sanskrit universities for its unanimous passage in Rajya Sabha on Monday, but they left no opportunity to accuse the government of “obsession” to promote Sanskrit even though it is not a popular spoken language.The discussion started with Congress’s Jairam Ramesh addressing the House in Sanskrit, claiming that the classical language had been the monopoly of a few while it enriched many other Indian languages. He said while Sanskrit is part of our legacy, the “beautiful language” has also been the instrument of caste oppression, caste discrimination and caste subjugation. He said hardly 15,000 people speak Sanskrit as “ the language of priests and courts has never been aa popular one”.TMC MP Sukhendu Sekhar Roy and HRD minister Ramesh Pokhriyal also spoke in Sanskrit.Ramesh referred to a government reply in Lok Sabha in which it had said that the Centre had spent Rs 640 crore to make Sanskrit popular while only Rs 24 crore was spent on Tamil, Rs 3 crore each on Telugu and Kannada and nothing on Malayalam and Odia. “Sir, we may not like this, but, this is a fact that historically Sanskrit has always been the elite language,” he said. BJP leader Bhupendra Yadav objected to Sanskrit being called “the elite’s language”.He also used urged HRD minister Ramesh Pokhriyal to liberate central universities from the stranglehold of his ministry.Left parties DMK and MDMK also claimed that Sanskrit is the monopoly of a very few. MDMK leader Vaiko’s observation that the bill was “disastrous” met with huge opposition from treasury benches. Another Congress member P L Hanumanthiah said the bill was brought at a time when “there are two students and 20 professors” in some Sanskrit departments. The debate took an interesting turn when BJP MP Subramanian Swamy pointed out how one has to learn Sanskrit in NASA, if he wants to study artificial intelligence.