India pushes for Hindi as an official language at UN

NEW DELHI: EXPERTS SAY PUSHING HINDI AT UN IS PART OF ‘HINDI, HINDU, HINDUTVA APPROACH’ THAT DENIES INDIA’S DIVERSITY

India is giving a fresh push to make Hindi the seventh official language of the United Nations, a proposal successive governments have considered since 2003. The government is seeking greater involvement from countries such as Mauritius and Fiji, with considerable Hindi speakers, to broad-base its campaign, said officials familiar with the development while admitting this would be a long haul.

A proposal for a new official language at UN needs to be passed by two-thirds members of the UN General Assembly (129 of 193) as the cost of providing the language service is borne by all memberstates. The government’s move is aimed at raising its diplomatic clout, although some experts see no merit in this argument.

The total cost of providing services in all the current UN official languages — English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, and Arabic — is about US$497 million. This includes documentation, translation, interpretation, verbatim reporting, printing in all four UN offices (in New York, Geneva, Vienna and Nairobi).

“The problem comes when apart from voting, the burden of the amount also falls on member states. Economically weaker countries that support us shy away from this,” external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj told Lok Sabha last week.

Experts such as Shashi Tharoor, who heads the parliamentary standing committee on external affairs, said this was aimed at achieving a political objective. “What disadvantage has Indian diplomacy at the UN suffered by not having Hindi as an official UN language? When there is no problem, why create one? This is a solution without a problem,” he told HT. “Pushing Hindi is part of a majoritarian political agenda, part of the ‘Hindi, Hindu, Hindutva’ approach that denies India’s diversity. The rest of India will not accept this divisive agenda.”