Mere Lip Service to Hindi Will Not Do

Tamil Nadu is a state in India and not a country in the far-off hinterlands of Africa or Latin America. But notwithstanding 100 years of lectures on nationalism by successive Sangh chiefs on Dussehra day and other occasions as well as by Prime Minister Narendra Modi since 2014, the largely pro-establishment Hindi media, especially the premier television channels, it seems, are yet to know the real boundary of India.

Perhaps for them the country's border does not extend much beyond Vindhyachal or the Vindhya range in central India and the Siliguri corridor in the east. The states in these regions hardly matter for Hindi TV channels and newspapers – unless there is political demand.

The September 27 stampede in the Karur town of Tamil Nadu, which left at least 41 dead, is the latest example of how our Hindi television channels based mostly in the national capital region of Delhi treat any news related to Tamil Nadu and other southern and eastern states.

Barring a handful of English TV outlets, the tragedy at the actor-turned-politician Vijay's Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam rally hardly got due coverage. There is no denying the fact that the Hindi electronic and print media of north India often give more space and time to incidents where a similar number of people (as in Karur) die in Europe and the United States than they had given to what happened here on September 27.

Business interest

Ironically, I got more initial information on the Karur incident from international channels than our Hindi counterparts in India. Just a few lines on the Karur tragedy and brief audio-visual presentations were enough for viewers of Hindi TV, or readers of newspapers and websites.

In a couple of cases, the sister English studios of the same channels gave more space to this mishap and even did follow-up stories for a few days. Its political fallout was too discussed in English channels.

The objective may be simple: while the English channels cater to the needs of south Indian viewers living anywhere in the country, the Hindi ones think that they do not have any such attraction.

Since advertisement has much to do with viewership, the Hindi channels, like vernacular dailies, do not think it necessary to give proper coverage to the news of peninsular India or the Northeast. They confine themselves to the cow-belt as herein lies their market. The advertisement rates of English channels, newspapers and websites are higher than those of their Hindi counterparts.

But the big question is: should those at the top of news organisations be so myopic and be guided by only business interest? Those in power who so very deeply wish to impose Hindi on all of India should at least be canny enough to know that this unfair objective of theirs can only be hoped to be achieved if non-Hindi regions are convinced that they are given proper coverage in the national media. They must know that Bollywood played a significant role in helping people as far as Central Asia understand Hindustani, that is a mixture of Hindi and Urdu.

Thus, these Hindi electronic channels can also play a role in integrating India. They must accept the fact that the people of the rest of India want to know much more about south India or even the Northeast. This is simply because now millions of Indians from the heartland of the country live in those states.

So far as the Karur incident is concerned, lakhs of non-English-speaking north Indians working in Tamil Nadu got inadequate information about what had actually happened at Vijay's rally simply because of scanty coverage by Delhi-based Hindi channels. As they do not understand Tamil, they could make out little from the regional language channels.

Except to some extent the Rajasthan Patrika (known as the Patrika outside Rajasthan), which has editions in south India too, there is hardly any pan-India Hindi newspaper. And this is largely due to the presence of Rajasthani businessmen (mostly Marwari Banias) all over India. Hindi-speaking readers struggle to find Hindi newspapers in metropolises like Mumbai as, save for the Navbharat Times, there is hardly any national daily published from here.

So, it is English television channels, websites and newspapers that enjoy a national character in a country where ironically more than 40% of the population claims that Hindi is their mother tongue.

While the Times of India boasts of having 139 editions spread in almost all the states of the country, no Hindi daily has its editions in even in a dozen states. In contrast, the Navbharat Times, the sister concern of the Times of India had in the 1990s shut down several of its editions.

In a similar way, prominent Hindi magazines such as Saptahik Hindustan, Dinmaan, Dharamyug and Ravivar had also closed down even before the advent of most private television news channels, the internet and the mobile boom.

Incidentally, these developments took place around the liberalisation, privatisation and  globalisation of the Indian economy in 1991.

It is true that English magazines like the Illustrated Weekly of India and Sunday too breathed their last around the same period, yet their case cannot be equated with that of their Hindi counterparts. This is simply because a number of English magazines such as India Today, The Week, Frontline and Outlook hit the stands between 1975 and 1995, but no Hindi periodical came up after the demise of the above-named ones.

Karnataka election debate

Another instance of north Indian bias can be found in TV debates not only in Hindi, but even more balanced English channels.

For example, the day that votes for the Karnataka assembly election were counted, on May 13, 2023, a premier national capital region-based English channel invited more than half a dozen panellists for a day-long show. The host was a very well-known anchor having a Gujarati surname with family roots in Goa. Except for one, the rest of the panellists who were present on the occasion were from north India.

What this television channel failed to appreciate is that English-speaking south Indian journalists and political pundits outnumber their Hindi counterparts. One fails to understand the compulsion behind not inviting them.

Billboards in Gujarati

The champions of Hindi have very valid reasons to criticise those who take a strong position for the cause of Marathi and Tamil in Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu respectively. Yet they should be a bit open-minded and flexible too, as this phenomenon of language chauvinism is not only confined to some states.

Even in the cities – like Vadodara, the cultural capital of Gujarat – an overwhelming number of billboards and the name plates of business establishments as well as other places are written only in Gujarati. Gujarati is promoted as it is the official language of the state.

As many leading flag-bearers of Hindi, the official (not national) language, come from Gujarat, they should take this fact into account. This causes a lot of hardship to tourists, traders from outside the state and other visitors.

Lip service to Hindi will not do. Those who sincerely want the language to expand will have to learn from the experience of others.

Soroor Ahmed is a Patna-based freelance journalist.

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