On February 19, Udhayanidhi Stalin, the deputy chief minister of the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, warned the Narendra Modi-led federal government against pushing Tamil people to “face another language war.” Tamils “value love but will never surrender for intimidation,” said Udhayanidhi, who also heads the youth wing of Tamil Nadu’s ruling party, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK).
In multilingual India, Hindi is the most spoken language, dominant in northern, central, and western India. In eastern and southern India, especially in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, any attempt at imposing Hindi has prompted strong resistance, including violent protests.
Udhayanidhi’s warning about “another language war” came after Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan said that 21.5 billion rupees ($246.7 million) worth of funds for Tamil Nadu will not be released until they accept the “three language formula” of the National Education Policy 2020 “in letter and spirit.”
Pradhan alleged that the Tamil Nadu government’s refusal to accept the NEP 2020 and the three-language formula was “politically motivated”: “They cannot think they are above the Constitution,” he said.
Tamil Nadu is India’s only state that has outright rejected the three-language formula prescribed in the NEP 2020. The NEP does not explicitly speak of mandatory instruction of Hindi; it says that the three languages to be learned by children will be the choice of states, regions, and the students themselves, so long as at least two of the three languages are native to India.
However, Tamil political parties fear this will inevitably open the floodgates for Hindi as the second native language other than one’s mother tongue or regional language. Reflecting their attitude toward stopping the entry of Hindi at the school level, Udhayanidhi said that several states that accepted Hindi stand to lose their mother tongues. “Bhojpuri, Bihari, Haryanvi have nearly died because of infiltration by Hindi,” he said.
Over the past decade, the BJP government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi has taken one measure after another to promote Hindi in non-Hindi-speaking states as well as abroad. Making Hindi India’s “connecting language” is one of the government’s declared agenda items.
Tamil Nadu is India’s only state with a two-language policy in school education. Tamil and English are taught in schools in the state, leaving no scope for anyone to learn Hindi, or any other language for that matter. Even India’s Official Languages Rules, 1976, exempts Tamil Nadu from its ambit.
Pradhan’s remarks prompted Tamil Nadu Chief Minister and DMK helmsman M.K. Stalin, Udhayanidhi’s father, to ask the Union minister to clarify which section of the Indian Constitution makes the three-language formula mandatory. Stalin slammed the Modi government for trying to turn “a multilingual, diverse country into a single-language nation.”
“I wish to say that we will not agree to the NEP even if the Center offers Rs 10,000 crore (100 billion rupees),” Stalin said, adding that he would “not allow the NEP and commit the sin of pushing Tamil Nadu backward by 2,000 years.” He pointed out that education was on the concurrent list of the federal government and the states, which means the Union government has no monopoly over education policies. “Tamils will not tolerate the audacity of blackmailing them,” said the chief minister.
Tamil Nadu’s anxiety over Hindi imposition has a long history. Tamil opposition to Hindi can be traced back to the Dravidian movement’s opposition to attempts by the Congress-led government in the Madras Presidency (as Tamil Nadu was known during colonial rule) to promote the teaching of Hindustani — a common form of Hindi and Urdu — in secondary schools in the late 1930s. Protests erupted and led to the death of two young protesters in police custody.
The language conflict continued to burn in post-independence India; the anti-Hindi agitation of 1965 claimed about 70 lives.
“Tamils were never Aryanised completely and never lost their identity in language and culture,” M.G.S. Narayanan, a former chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), pointed out in 2009, adding that Tamils are the only people in India, other than the tribal people, to have retained their original language and national personality despite a good deal of Aryan influence.
Tamils have vehemently opposed attempts to make Hindi India’s connecting language. It was originally a project of the Congress-led governments. While the Congress largely backtracked from the policy, the Bharatiya Janata Party revitalized it soon after coming to power in 2014. In several non-Hindi speaking states, including Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and the eastern state of West Bengal, these measures are perceived as an imposition of Hindi.
Opposition parties, including the DMK, the Congress and the Left parties, have alleged that imposing Hindi as the national or connecting language is a threat to India’s federal system and national unity.
In February, as the Center versus Tamil Nadu war intensified, India’s Vice President Jagdeep Dhankar’s remark that “the best way to conquer a territory is to overtake its culture and destroy its language” fueled the fire. Aggressors, who entered India centuries ago, “were very oppressive, very cruel, brutal for our language, for our culture, for our religious places,” he said.
While Dhankar was referring to the Muslim dynasties from Central Asia who entered India from the end of the first millennium to the mid-second millennium, language activists in non-Hindi speaking states weaponized his remarks to intensify their opposition to the Modi government’s push for Hindi. Tamil Nadu’s war resonated beyond its border.
“This is exactly what the Indian government is doing through Hindi imposition, slowly erasing non-Hindi languages to take complete political control of non-Hindi regions,” Kannada language activist Arun Javgal wrote in a social media post on X on February 21, sharing a news report of Dhankhar’s speech. Kannada is the main language spoken in the southern state of Karnataka.
In West Bengal, Garga Chatterjee, the leader of the Bengali rights group Bangla Pokkho, criticized the state government for having allowed Hindi as a third language. “The state language and English are enough,” said Chatterjee, whose organization’s conflict with Hindi and Hindi-speaking people in the state has gained traction in recent years.
With the BJP’s push for winning elections in Bengal and Tamil Nadu expected to intensify — the two states are scheduled to vote in assembly elections in 2026 — the language conflict looks unlikely to die down anytime soon.