Devirupa Mitra By

NEW DELHI: India’s diplomacy has now gone desi. The elite Indian Foreign Service (IFS) that takes pride in the use of Queen’s English now sees it fit to promote Bharat Sarkar’s Bhasha. In line with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s preference for Hindi, even during his diplomatic engagements with world leaders, the Union Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) has gone ahead and opened a full-fledged Hindi division in its organisational structure and brought it under a Joint Secretary-rank IFS officer, thereby increasing its hierarchical importance.

Till 10 days ago, the division was headed by a Deputy Secretary-rank official borrowed from the Ministry of Home Affairs’ (MHA) Official Languages Department, who reported to Joint Secretary (Administration). Thus, the MEA has become the first ministry, outside the MHA, to create a Hindi language-promotion division.

Amid the divisions dealing with Pakistan or those monitoring the sensitive regions of central Asia or looking after day-to-day maintenance of Indian missions abroad, now sits an official with the whole set of office paraphernalia and staff members from the MEA, but entrusted with the task of only promoting Hindi.

Neena Malhotra, a 1992-batch IFS official, would be heading the MEA’s Hindi division. She now holds the designation of Joint Secretary (Hindi). She is assisted by MEA officials experienced in translating public documents.

Hindi’s acche din in the Foreign Ministry, of course, began from the first working day of Modi administration — when South Block scrambled to find Hindi interpreters for Prime Minister for back-to-back bilateral talks with eight foreign guests at his swearing-in ceremony.

After deputing senior Joint Secretaries to do the interpretation during several trips, the MEA has finally honed in on two regulars to do the job. Neelakshi Saha, MEA director in West Africa is Modi’s main interpreter, with her back-up being Shipra Ghosh, a Russian language expert in the Eurasian division.

A long-term plan has also been drawn up to get more Hindi-trained interpreters from the Mahatma Gandhi Antarrashtriya Hindi Vishwa Vidyalaya in Wardha, with a similar request also made to the JNU.

But, that was just the beginning. As the MEA worked out the logistics to find a regular interpreter for the Prime Minister, there had also been a focus on increasing the use of Hindi in internal communication. This means that circulars and notices are increasingly becoming bilingual. Recently, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj had publicly expressed her happiness at getting a three-page Hindi note in a file forwarded to her.

The use of Hindi within MEA has been one of her pet plans — having given out instructions that she will speak in Hindi in meetings with foreign interlocutors if they are not fluent in English.

Besides the intensive Hindi promotion, one of the key rationale for having a Hindi division was that it will do the groundwork for hosting the World Hindi Conference later this year.

The picture is, however, not rosy for the MEA on the official language front. Recently, the ministry had confessed to a Parliamentary Standing Committee that Indian missions abroad might not have Hindi typists.

And despite having a BJP-led Government at the helm, it is still a pipe dream to get the UN to adopt Hindi as one of its official languages. This is a demand which regularly figures in Parliamentary questions and debates every year.

In reply to an RTI, the MEA said it would cost the country over $14 million annually to cover the expenditure of Hindi in the UN. This was based on the 1973 decision to introduce Arabic, so the actual cost now would be much higher. The general reluctance of countries to support proposals with additional financial burden is another dimension.