Srinagar: Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Mohammad Yousuf Tarigami on Friday said imposing the Hindi language in Jammu and Kashmir will amount to an assault on national integration and further deepen the divide in the Union Territory.
The imposition of Hindi is an arbitrary decision of the BJP government that has a singular purpose, to deepen the divide in a multilingual, multi-ethnic society of Jammu and Kashmir, he said.
“The direction of Jammu and Kashmir State Council of Educational Research and Training (JKSCERT) to teach the Hindi language of classes Ist to 10th in all schools amounts to deepening the divide further,” Tarigami said in a statement.
He said such recommendations are negating the legacy of the freedom struggle and the constitutional promises of nourishing unity and diversity.
“Favouring Hindi at the cost of other languages amounts to an attack on national integration,” he added.
Tarigami said the educational system and administrative institutions have accepted Urdu “which is a modern Indian language, as a link language since Maharaja Hari Singh declared it as the official link language in 1920”.
“The Urdu language, without being the regional language, is intelligible to 100 percent of our population,” he said.
