As Stalin warns Centre, recalling the anti-Hindi agitations in the past in Tamil Nadu

If implemented, the vast non-Hindi speaking population will be made second-class citizens in their own land.

Imposing Hindi is against the integrity of India.

The BJP govt would do well to learn lessons from the Anti-Hindi agitations in the past.#StopHindiImposition 2/2 pic.twitter.com/0R1IuvtzEx

— M.K.Stalin (@mkstalin) October 10, 2022

Earlier in 2018, Stalin, who was then Working President of the DMK, had warned of “1965-like” protests in Tamil Nadu if the Centre continued to impose Hindi on the state, recalling the DMK’s anti-Hindi mobilisations from over a half century ago.

So, what happened in 1965?

The year is a landmark in the history of the Dravidian Movement and its engagement with the Indian nation state. In 1963, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru presented The Official Languages Bill, which set 1965 as the year when English would make way for Hindi as the country’s sole official language.

The DMK, which was the political inheritor of the Dravidian Movement, began a campaign against the move. It announced that party cadres would burn copies of Chapter 17 of the Constitution, which accorded Hindi the status of official language, following which DMK chief C N Annadurai was arrested and sentenced to six months in prison.

As the opposition escalated, on January 25, 1964, a 27-year-old DMK worker named Chinnasamy set himself on fire to protest the imposition of Hindi, becoming the first martyr in the cause of Tamil.

But the central government remained unfazed, and announced that from January 26, 1965, Hindi would become the sole official language of India.

The day before the designated date, on January 25, 1965, senior DMK leaders, including Annadurai, were taken into preventive custody. Some 50,000 students from colleges in Madras marched to Fort St George, the seat of the government, to petition the Chief Minister of the then Madras State, M Bhaktavatsalam, to remove Hindi from the school curriculum.

“In the early hours of 26 January, even as Kalaignar (M Karunanidhi) and many other DMK functionaries were taken into custody, a DMK member, T M Sivalingam, doused his body with gasoline and immolated himself in Kodambakkam, Madras… Virugambakkam Aranganathan, Ayyanpalayam Veerappan and Rangasamuthiram Muthu would also choose death by fire, while Keeranoor Muthu, Viralimalai Shanmugham and Peelamedu Dhandapani would consume poison to take their life,” wrote R Kannan in Anna: The Life and Times of C N Annadurai.

After two Union Ministers from Tamil Nadu, C Subramaniam and O V Alagesan, threatened to resign, Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, who had succeeded Nehru in 1964, gave a public assurance that Hindi would not be imposed, and that English would continue to be the official language.

In February 1965, the Congress Working Committee passed a resolution in favour of the three-language formula in schools, and sought the amendment of the Official Languages Act, 1963, to address the fears of non-Hindi speaking populations.

What was the impact of the 1965 agitation?

The victory in the battle against Hindi imposition established an important aspect of Indian federalism: that India’s linguistic plurality was not to be messed with, and that every Indian language was to be accorded equal respect.

Politically, the impact on the Congress in Tamil Nadu was disastrous — it could never recover the ground it lost during the anti-Hindi agitations. Two years later, in 1967, the DMK won the Assembly elections, and the Dravidian parties alone have been in power in the state ever since. The government of Chief Minister Annadurai renamed Madras State as Tamil Nadu, and embarked on a mission to establish the primacy of Tamil in public discourse.

What is the historical and cultural context of the opposition to Hindi in Tamil Nadu?

The opposition to Hindi is about both linguistic pride and the assertion of a regional cultural identity. Across India in the early 20th century, nationalisms centred on linguistic identity had developed parallel to the Indian National Movement. The social justice politics of Tamil Nadu, which initially lacked a sense of the nation, embraced Tamil and Dravidian linguistic and ethnic identities to distinguish itself both from the Congress-led National Movement and the communists.

It was the earlier anti-Hindi agitation of 1937-39 that allowed Periyar E V Ramaswamy and his followers to reclaim political space after losing the provincial elections to the Congress in 1936. C Rajagopalachari’s government had introduced Hindi in primary schools in the Madras presidency, and the anti-Hindi agitation led by Periyar powered the imagination of a Tamil/Dravidian nation independent of the Indian nation state.

The Tamil versus Hindi argument also seamlessly joined the Dravidian versus Aryan debate (the caste system and Brahmin supremacy was projected as values imposed by the Aryans who came from northern India) — this imagery (of Tamil versus Hindi, South versus North) has since fed and framed every federal assertion in Tamil Nadu — from the solidarity mobilisations for Sri Lankan Tamils in the 1980s to the right to conduct jallikattu in recent times.

Why have these old tensions risen again?

The rise of the BJP post 2014 has raised the spectre of a Hindi-Hindu-Hindutva India, and triggered subnationalist counter-narratives in all the Southern states.

In Tamil Nadu, Hindi and Centre have long been a trope for political parties to mobilise cadres and divert public attention from their performance. Post-Jayalalithaa, the influence of the Centre and the BJP on Tamil Nadu politics has increased manifold, and local outfits sense a potential shift in the political dynamic. As the DMK seeks to reassert its position as Tamil Nadu’s predominant regional party, what better legacy to invoke than that of 1965 to position itself as the protector of Tamil interests?