New Delhi tweaks Hindi language bill after south India protests 

In this May 23, 2019 picture, election results are announced in English and Hindi on a screen at a counting center in Mumbai, India. A proposed law making Hindi a mandatory third language to be taught in schools across India is facing strong resistance in southern Indian states, especially Tamil Nadu. (AP file photo)
Updated 03 June 2019
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New Delhi tweaks Hindi language bill after south India protests 

  • Bill seeks to make Hindi a mandatory third language to be taught in schools across India
  • In 1965, Tamil Nadu faced violent protests when the center proposed to make Hindi India’s only official language

NEW DELHI: After strong resistance from the southern Indian states, especially Tamil Nadu, the Indian government on Monday revised a controversial draft bill that proposed to make Hindi a mandatory third language to be taught in schools across India.

The government said in a statement on Monday that “flexibility in the choice of languages” in schools has been changed, omitting any reference to teaching Hindi to non-Hindi states.

The draft bill released on May 31 by the Human Resources Development Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank was one of the recommendations for a new national education policy that intended to have a three-language formula in schools, a departure from the existing two-language set-up.

It proposed to teach in the Hindi-speaking north Indian states a modern Indian language besides Hindi and English. However, in non-Hindi speaking states, which comprise mostly east, northeast, west and south India, Hindi learning was proposed to be made mandatory besides a regional language and English.

There was a a huge political outcry in Tamil Nadu within hours of the release of the draft bill with most of the political parties, including the ruling All India Anna Dramuk Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), a regional ally of New Delhi’s ruling party, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), strongly objecting to changing the existing two-language formula.

Resistance was also visible on social media with many in south India launching the hashtag #HindinottheNationallanguage.

A Twitter handle called “1000 friends of South” wrote: “The BJP government’s real face is beginning to emerge ... Hindi is being imposed on South Indians. Tamil Nadu has rebelled against BJP-Govt. Let’s join them to fight the imposition of Hindi!”

On Monday, after the tweak of the draft bill, popular India musician and composer A.R. Rahman tweeted: “Beautiful solution. Hindi is not compulsory in Tamil Nadu … draft has been rectified.”

A. Saravanan, of Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), a powerful regional party of Tamil Nadu, said: “The BJP government, which caters to Hindi states, doesn’t believe in pluralism.”

Saravanan told Arab News: “We believe in the concept of unity in diversity but they believe in uniformity. The strength of India lies in diversity and pluralism. By imposing Hindi on non-Hindi speaking states, the BJP wants to consolidate the Hindi-speaking vote banks.” 

He added: “What was the need to bring in a three-language policy when a two-language policy was working fine? If someone wants to study Hindi instead of Tamil then that option is available under the two-language formula. Why impose Hindi on students?”

Kovai Sathyan, of the ruling AIADMK in Tamil Nadu, said: “There should not have been so much protest over a draft bill.”

Sathyan, a spokesperson for AIADMK, a regional ally of the BJP, added: “Education is in the hands of the state and the center cannot impose any law on education on the state. So those opposing the draft bill are overreacting. We are committed to maintaining a two-language policy.”

Sathyan told Arab News: “A country like India cannot have one official language.” 

H.D. Kumaraswamy, the chief minister of Karnataka, one of the five south Indian states, said: “One language should not be imposed on others for any reason in the name of a three-language policy.”

Raj Thackeray, a regional leader of the western state of Maharashtra, said: “Hindi is not our mother tongue, do not enforce it on us and incite us.”

Faced with the protests, New Delhi went in for damage control on Sunday with two of its ministers — Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and the Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar — issuing a statement on Sunday saying that “the draft will be reviewed before implementation.”

In 1965, Tamil Nadu faced violent protests when the center proposed to make Hindi India’s only official language. 

The people of Tamil Nadu are proud of their language, Tamil, which is considered the most ancient language of the Indian subcontinent. The politics in the state centers around the Dravidian movement, which worships the Tamil language and literature, and any attempt to promote another language becomes a highly emotional issue. 

According to the 2011 census, about 44 percent of the Indian population speaks Hindi, making it one of the most widely spoken languages in the country. 

India does not have a national language but designates 22 languages as official languages. Hindi and English are among the official languages of India and they are widely spoken.

N. Sathiya Moorthy, of the think tank Observer Research Foundation (ORF), said: “The controversy was totally avoidable but the timing seems to have been motivated yet miscalculated.”

Moorthy added: “If the central ministers Jaishankar and Nirmala Sitharaman say that there will be consultations then why you are not going ahead with consultations straightway without kicking up a controversy?”

He told Arab News that the BJP was trying to test the waters in South India and “that way it is trying to find a new element to consolidate the Hindi heartland.”

In the recently held elections, the BJP could not open its account in three of five south Indian states. Traditionally the party is known as a north Indian phenomenon with its base coming from the Hindi-speaking population in the north and west of the country.


Indonesia’s Supreme Court reverses acquittal of former official in slavery case

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Indonesia’s Supreme Court reverses acquittal of former official in slavery case

JAKARTA: Indonesia’s Supreme Court jailed a former government official accused of human trafficking for four years, reversing a lower court decision to acquit him after people were found in cages in his palm oil plantation.
Condemned internationally and at home, the senior official in the provincial government in North Sumatra, Terbit Rencana Perangin-angin, had been accused of human trafficking, torture, forced labor, and slavery.
Prosecutors launched an appeal after a lower court acquitted him of the charges in July.
Indonesia’s Supreme Court said he would serve four years in jail, without specifying reasons, in a ruling dated Nov. 15 and seen on the court’s website on Tuesday.
The Supreme Court and prosecutors did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Reuters has sought comment from Terbit’s lawyer.
The macabre case came to light in 2022, when a police corruption investigation into Terbit found people detained in cages on his property, drawing condemnation from rights groups.
A police investigation found 665 people had been held in cells on his property since 2010, court documents showed.
Terbit, who was jailed for nine years for corruption in 2022, had previously claimed the detained individuals were participating in a drug rehabilitation program.
Prosecutors said they had been tortured and forced to work on his plantation. Six had died in captivity, Indonesia’s rights body found.

Four Pakistan security forces killed as ex-PM Khan supporters flood capital

Updated 24 min 7 sec ago
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Four Pakistan security forces killed as ex-PM Khan supporters flood capital

ISLAMABAD: Pakistani protesters demanding the release of ex-prime minister Imran Khan on Tuesday killed four members of the nation’s security forces, the government said, as the crowds defied police and closed in on the capital’s center.
More than ten thousand protesters armed with sticks and slingshots took on police in central Islamabad on Tuesday afternoon, AFP journalists saw, less than three kilometers (two miles) from the government enclave they aim to occupy.
Khan was barred from standing in February elections that were marred by allegations of rigging, sidelined by dozens of legal cases that he claims were confected to prevent his comeback.
But his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party has defied a government crackdown with regular rallies. Tuesday’s is the largest in the capital since Khan was jailed in August 2023.
Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi said “miscreants” involved in the march had killed four members of the paramilitary Rangers force on a city highway leading toward the government sector.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said the men had been “run over by a vehicle.”
“These disruptive elements do not seek revolution but bloodshed,” he said in a statement. “This is not a peaceful protest, it is extremism.”
The government said Monday that one police officer had also been killed and nine more were critically wounded by demonstrators who set out toward Islamabad on Sunday.


The capital has been locked down since late Saturday, with mobile Internet sporadically cut and more than 20,000 police flooding the streets, many armed with riot shields and batons.
The government has accused protesters of attempting to derail a state visit by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who arrived for a three-day visit on Monday.
Last week, the Islamabad city administration announced a two-month ban on public gatherings.
But PTI convoys traveled from their power base in northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and the most populous province of Punjab, hauling aside roadblocks of stacked shipping containers.
“We are deeply frustrated with the government, they do not know how to function,” 56-year-old protester Kalat Khan told AFP on Monday. “The treatment we are receiving is unjust and cruel.”
The government cited “security concerns” for the mobile Internet outages, while Islamabad’s schools and universities were also ordered shut on Monday and Tuesday.
“Those who will come here will be arrested,” Interior Minister Naqvi told reporters late Monday at D-Chowk, the public square outside Islamabad’s government buildings that PTI aims to occupy.
PTI’s chief demand is the release of Khan, the 72-year-old charismatic former cricket star who served as premier from 2018 to 2022 and is the lodestar of their party.
They are also protesting alleged tampering in the February polls and a recent government-backed constitutional amendment giving it more power over the courts, where Khan is tangled in dozens of cases.


Sharif’s government has come under increasing criticism for deploying heavy-handed measures to quash PTI’s protests.
“It speaks of a siege mentality on the part of the government and establishment — a state in which they see themselves in constant danger and fearful all the time of being overwhelmed by opponents,” read one opinion piece in the English-language Dawn newspaper published Monday.
“This urges them to take strong-arm measures, not occasionally but incessantly.”
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said “blocking access to the capital, with motorway and highway closures across Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, has effectively penalized ordinary citizens.”
The US State Department appealed for protesters to refrain from violence, while also urging authorities to “respect human rights and fundamental freedoms and to ensure respect for Pakistan’s laws and constitution as they work to maintain law and order.”
Khan was ousted by a no-confidence vote after falling out with the kingmaking military establishment, which analysts say engineers the rise and fall of Pakistan’s politicians.
But as opposition leader, he led an unprecedented campaign of defiance, with PTI street protests boiling over into unrest that the government cited as the reason for its crackdown.
PTI won more seats than any other party in this year’s election but a coalition of parties considered more pliable to military influence shut them out of power.


Russia’s Medvedev warns West over discussing nuclear weapons for Ukraine

Updated 26 November 2024
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Russia’s Medvedev warns West over discussing nuclear weapons for Ukraine

MOSCOW: Senior Russian security official Dmitry Medvedev said on Tuesday that if the West supplied nuclear weapons to Ukraine then Moscow could consider such a transfer to be tantamount to an attack on Russia, providing grounds for a nuclear response.
The New York Times reported last week that some unidentified Western officials had suggested that US President Joe Biden could give Ukraine nuclear weapons, though there were fears such a step would have serious implications.
“American politicians and journalists are seriously discussing the consequences of the transfer of nuclear weapons to Kyiv,” Medvedev, who served as Russia’s president from 2008 to 2012, said on Telegram.
Medvedev said that even the threat of such a transfer of nuclear weapons could be considered as preparation for a nuclear war against Russia.
“The actual transfer of such weapons can be equated to the fait accompli of an attack on our country,” under Russia’s newly updated nuclear doctrine, he said.


China sends naval, air forces to shadow US plane over Taiwan Strait

Updated 26 November 2024
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China sends naval, air forces to shadow US plane over Taiwan Strait

  • The US Navy’s 7th fleet said a P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft had flown through the strait

BEIJING: China’s military said on Tuesday it deployed naval and air forces to monitor and warn a US Navy patrol aircraft that flew through the sensitive Taiwan Strait, denouncing the United States for trying to “mislead” the international community.
Around once a month, US military ships or aircraft pass through or above the waterway that separates democratically governed Taiwan from China — missions that always anger Beijing.
China claims sovereignty over Taiwan and says it has jurisdiction over the strait. Taiwan and the United States dispute that, saying the strait is an international waterway.
The US Navy’s 7th fleet said a P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft had flown through the strait “in international airspace,” adding that the flight demonstrated the United States’ commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific.
“By operating within the Taiwan Strait in accordance with international law, the United States upholds the navigational rights and freedoms of all nations,” it said in a statement.
China’s military criticized the flight as “public hype,” adding that it monitored the US aircraft throughout its transit and “effectively” responded to the situation.
“The relevant remarks by the US distort legal principles, confuse public opinion and mislead international perceptions,” the military’s Eastern Theatre Command said in a statement.
“We urge the US side to stop distorting and hyping up and jointly safeguard regional peace and stability.”
In April, China’s military said it sent fighter jets to monitor and warn a US Navy Poseidon in the Taiwan Strait, a mission that took place just hours after a call between the Chinese and US defense chiefs. (Reporting by Beijing Newsroom; Additional reporting and writing by Ben Blanchard in Taipei; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)


Ukraine says Russia launched ‘record’ 188 drones overnight

Updated 26 November 2024
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Ukraine says Russia launched ‘record’ 188 drones overnight

KYIV: Russia staged a record number of drone attacks overnight over Ukraine, damaging buildings and “critical infrastructure” in several regions, the air force said Tuesday.
“During the night attack, the enemy launched a record number of Shahed strike unmanned aerial vehicles and unidentified drones,” the air force said, referring to Iranian-designed drones and putting the figure at 188.