Linguistic Regionalism in India

Abstract

THE MAJOR problem confronting the newly independent countries of South and Southeast Asia today is national unity, and in many of them one of the great impediments to the achievement of that unity is language. Throughout this area the demand for linguistic autonomy has challenged the authority of central governments and threatened their stability. It has been encountered by the Government of Burma which has been forced to concede a separate Karen state, and by the Pakistanis whose Bengali-speaking population in April i954 elected a provincial ministry that spoke openly of secession until the central government suppressed it. It would not be accurate to describe this phenomenon as linguistic nationalism for rarely do these linguistic groups demand a completely independent status. Linguistic regionalism is a better term. It is not a new phenomenon nor is it peculiar to this part of Asia. Belgium and Switzerland, to cite the best Western examples, have both had to contend with it. The largest world power to face this problem within its borders has been the Soviet Union, and the integration of the various linguistic and national groups within the USSR is an accomplishment about which Soviet propaganda never ceases to boast. The Soviets claim to have found the solution to linguistic regionalism in the dialectics of Marxism-Leninism, and Stalin's writings on nationalities and linguistics are supposed to contain the key to this problem wherever it is found. It is this key which the Chinese Communists claim to have used with brilliant success in dealing with the sixty national minorities in China,1 and which was responsible for the formation of the so-called Thai People's Republic in the border areas of South China, Burma and Indochina. Other Asian Communist parties also offer it as the answer to linguistic regionalism in Asia. In India today the problem has reached an acute stage, and all the resources of her parliamentary system are being taxed to cope with it. Although the agitation in India has shown no evidence of political separatism (as has the Bengali agitation in East Pakistan), it is safe to