“We consider all Indian languages as soul of Bharatiyata and the link to a better future for the country.” These words of Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi symbolise the quintessential core of the transformative National Education Policy (NEP) 2020. By ensuring foremost priority to one’s mother tongue and regional languages, NEP 2020 conclusively strengthens cooperative federalism. Fabricating fictitious north-south fault lines for political profit and blatantly peddling false narratives like Hindi imposition is divisive federalism.

NEP 2020 like the earlier education policies of 1968 and 1986, follows the three-language policy. But the similarity absolutely ends there. Under the Congress government’s education policies (1968 and 1986), students in non-Hindi speaking states were compelled to take Hindi as the third language. But now under NEP 2020, the students are empowered to choose any regional language of their choice. The defining difference is that NEP 2020 progressively leaves the choice of the third language to the states, regions and students. This is a momentous shift in our educational policy to foster linguistic diversity in our nation. Rinsing and repeating false binaries and strawman arguments like........

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