Should English really continue to be regarded as a foreign language in India? On 28 September 2026, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court, comprising Chief Justice of India Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and Vipul M. Pancholi, made an observation to this effect while hearing a petition challenging the CBSE’s implementation of the three-language policy from the current academic year.

The Supreme Court wondered whether English could still be called a “non-indigenous language” when its roots had spread so deep into Indian soil. The next hearing in the case is scheduled for six weeks later. Hopefully, we will have some indication of the Court’s decision on this question then. The Court’s observations have already offered a glimpse of the direction in which its thinking might be moving. Whatever answer the Supreme Court eventually gives to the question of whether English can be called a foreign language, the question itself is perhaps far more important than the answer in contemporary India.

Perhaps the time has come for us to decide whether we should continue to regard English as a foreign language. The controversy surrounding the three-language policy is rooted primarily in the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which recommends the adoption of such a policy in school education. Under this framework, students are to have the opportunity to learn three languages, at least two of which must be Indian languages. The NEP, however, stipulates that no language should be imposed on any state or student in implementing the policy.

Its proponents argue that the policy will enhance students’ multilingual competence, strengthen the role of the mother tongue, and ensure the preservation and development of Indian languages. On the face of it, such a policy hardly seems objectionable. Yet it has already encountered considerable opposition. The resistance has been particularly strong in the southern states, which, in the light of past experience, suspect that the three-language policy is essentially a strategy for imposing Hindi on them. Questions have also been raised about the need to take the states’ objections........

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