Amberish K Diwanji

Mulayam Singh Yadav has a lazy ideology which goes like this: if you cannot make the poor rich, then make the rich poor. In Mulayam's case, it applies to language. Since he cannot teach everyone English; he wants no one to learn English. His Samajwadi Party's manifesto speaks of limiting the use of English and computers.

English cannot be banned because it is a global language, spoken across the world. It is the language of business, technology, and education. It is the language a Frenchman and a German are most likely to speak to each other unless one of them knows the other's language. This applies to all the continents in the world today, with perhaps the exception of South America. It is the language required for any job with an international/global aspect; today that applies to virtually all white-collar jobs at senior levels.

China has made learning English a national mission. This rapid spread of English might well make this manufacturing giant into a service giant, eating into what is till now India's domain. Mulayam is then only helping China overtake India in the global service-provider stakes.

Mulayam hasn't offered an alternative to English, perhaps because there is none. The Constitution terms Hindi and English as the official language; but while English is India's working language, Hindi is India's entertainment language. It is the language of films and songs and shayris, of backslapping and merriment. But few outside the northern states actually do work in Hindi.

There is a reason for that. A larger proportion of India's illiterates are from northern India, which means that while they can all speak Hindi, only a handful can read or write it. The educated elites who speak Hindi at home have invariably studied in English-medium schools and colleges (the latter often outside north India), and they remain more comfortable writing and issuing notices in English. No wonder then that since Independence, the use of English in India has increased, not decreased.

One can understand Mulayam's frustration against English, which he sees as denying opportunities to the people he represents, an underclass segment. But the way out is to ensure education for them all with English as a compulsory second language. Some years ago, Mulayam had sought to teach students in UP the Tamil language to compensate for Tamil Nadu students learning Hindi. A decade later, let us ask: how many actually learn Tamil? UP students don't need Tamil unless they go to work in Tamil Nadu (in which case they will anyways learn the language). Instead, if he had then stressed on English, we might have by now been seeing the first lot come out of school with better opportunities. Instead, by railing against English, Mulayam only denied the poorer classes the benefits that the upper-classes continue to benefit from.

In 1977, the communists banned English in government-run schools in West Bengal, where they had come to power. The result was millions of (poor) Bengalis who lacked the means to improve their plight, made worse by the fact that Bengal ceased to offer sufficient job opportunities to its people. But lakhs of the middle-class children went to private schools and learnt good English. They picked up the job opportunities outside Bengal that their poorer cousins forced to study in government-run schools never could.

Mulayam's ideas seeking to ban the use of computers is equally ridiculous and makes him sound like those Taliban sorts. No one can ban technological progress. Trying to do so puts a nation behind and makes it vulnerable as and when the rest of the world changes. It was superior technology that, among other things, helped Britain conquer India. If millions cannot be employed because of computers, it means their education needs to be improved so that they can be put to better use, not to do repetitive tasks that computers can do much better.

That such ridiculous ideas should emanate from a party that aspires to govern India and from a man who has pretensions of becoming the prime minister, are not just disgusting but dangerous for India's future and prosperity. Let us be clear: English and computers will serve India's future far better than Mulayam ever can. That should make it clear what needs to be kept and what can be thrown out.