Tamil Nadu’s Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) has launched a fresh war against Hindi. What’s unfortunate is that it is based on a wilful distortion of facts, largely aimed at scoring political brownie points, obviously at the risk of threatening national unity and integrity.

It is a wilful distortion, as the Centre, through its three-language formula, does not propose imposing Hindi on non-Hindi-speaking states. In fact, DMK chief and Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin’s recent diatribe is wrong on two counts: first, the three-language formula, against which Stalin has taken up the cudgels, as suggested by the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, is not a new phenomenon; and second, the current Union government’s stance on Hindi is far more flexible compared to that of its predecessors.

As for the three-language formula, the University Education Commission made the first recommendation for such a policy in 1948-49; interestingly, at that time, the commission, while conceding that Hindi was in no way superior over regional languages such as Tamil, Kannada, and Telugu, or even Marathi, Bengali, and Punjabi, foresaw the former eventually replacing English as the link language in the country.

The NEPs of 1968 and 1986 retained the three-language formula and supported the promotion of Hindi as the third and link language. However, while the three-language formula was implemented nationally in 1968 under the NEP, it couldn’t be imposed in Tamil Nadu due to the anti-Hindi agitation spearheaded by the DMK. In........

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