The language wars are all around us—the imposition of Hindi on non-Hindi-speaking states by stealth, the war between the ancestry of Tamil and Kannada, speakers of multiple regional languages in the north upset at being subsumed into Hindi and so on. Into this cauldron, an inflammatory stick was added by Union Home Minister Amit Shah when he declared at a book launch that "in this country, those who speak English will soon feel ashamed… the creation of such a society is not far away.” Of course, it does not behove the position and stature of the second-most important man in the Government of India to utter such words, but the issue is more than one of propriety.

The rant, or threat as some have defined it, can be dismissed as yet........

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