When the majority are excluded due to their mother tongues

The lead-in-Maggi has done something interesting. Some metropolitan elites have started talking about full disclosure of ingredient details on a product package. Maggi, like some other products, carried some information on its package, in English. Absent in this ‘talking’ are the people. Neither urban consumer-rights wallahs nor shiny, happy, ‘customer-friendly’ (what does that even mean?) companies point out that English-only info reaches a miniscule portion of the subcontinent’s consumers. What good is the comprehensiveness of Maggi’s information if most eaters can’t read it? Most provinces of the Indian Union are more populous than most nation-states. They individually provide large enough markets for province-specific customised packaging. Companies couldn’t care less.

If companies are looking for the best practices from the Indian Union government’s own behaviour, they’ll get much reassurance. They’ll learn that there’s no need to create public websites or provide information in Tamil, Maithili, Gujarati, Marathi or any language that isn’t brown-sahib English or Sanskritised Hindi. Since 1947, the Central government has actively signalled that languages of majority of Indian Union’s peoples don’t matter. You may have seen advertisements where parliamentary committees, crucial to the feedback and consultation process in any functioning democracy, ask for people’s opinions. But if your mother tongue is Kannada and you know only to write in Kannada, just like many people’s mother tongue is Hindi and they know only to write in Hindi, you won’t be able to write back to Parliament with your views but the latter person can. Does that sound like a system designed to suppress the viewpoints of the majority? If you think that’s unjust, sorry folks. That boat sailed in 1947. So, deal with it. The Central government will not employ translators to deal with you. It wants 700 million plus of you to learn English or Hindi.

If the biggest guy with the widest power and deepest money-bags has this attitude, it’s easy to imagine what message it sends to others. What may be a matter of linguistic dignity for a bilingual Bengali elite like me, fast becomes a matter of life and death for another Bengali who is unable to access various public schemes because all information and forms are in English-Hindi. It starts with not knowing what ingredients there are in the packaged good that you brought and spreads through all walks of life. Let’s start with elite ones. Emirates, the airline owned by the Dubai government, provides information in more South-Asian languages (including Bengali and Malayalam) in its airplane bathrooms than Air India does or ever will do. Bureaucrats and clerks compose missing children or dead unclaimed body notices in English only, hence wilfully targeting the most unlikely respondent. This is conscious criminal apathy. ATMs of most PSU banks will show you a screen to chose ‘your’ language. The choices don’t have languages of most of ‘you’. United Bank of India (UBI), headquartered in Kolkata,  and created by merging four Bengali-owned and largely Bengali customer-based banks, doesn’t provide Bangla as a language choice at its ATMs. They want your money to lend to various corrupt kings of good times but don’t want you to take advantage of their banking services in the language a significant section of it’s customers are most comfortable in. You’ll see such examples at every single place where New Delhi has the powers to call the shots.

Making marginal by linguistic discrimination, restricting access on the basis of language to essential services and redressal mechanisms that can mean a matter of life and death, especially for the poor — what kind of apartheid madness is this?

The author comments on politics and culture