Welcome to CJI Dr. D.Y. Chandrachud
Dr. D.Y. Chandrachud, a brilliant legal mind has been appointed as 50th CJ of Supreme Court of India on November 9. He is known for giving law a human face. It is hoped that he will discharge his duties without any fear or favour and will remain faithful to the Constitution in letter and spirit. Late Justice V.R. Krishna Aiyar has said that Judges are not free from bias and prejudice. I am sure that Hon’ble Justice Dr. D.Y. Chandrachud will prove this statement of his fraternity wrong.
I wish him all the success.
Farooq Abdulgafar Bawani
Rajkot, Gujarat
At Serious Risk
As it is, seniors are not very conversant with using electronic devices, and are at serious risk of falling prey to the many fraudsters and scamsters now mushrooming all over the place.
The only income for many senior citizens is their pension and according to news published in the media that seniors are being targeted to share their OTPs under the guise of submitting their Life Certificate which has to be done once a year.
Unless there is somebody either at the bank or the pension office providing these crooks with details, there is no way they can target only select individuals. The government has pushed for digitisation without taking into account the vulnerability of senior citizens.
It needs to devise another way to ensure that the Life Certificates are submitted without any difficulty in a safe and secure manner.
Anthony Henriques
Mumbai, Maharashtra
The Principle of Federalism and Local Language
Apropos the Cover Story “Renewed Attempts to Impose Hindi Enrage Southern States” (Radiance, 12 November, 2022).
There is a strong anti-English strand to the BJP or for that matter the Congress and its support base. Now it is Hindi vs. everybody else’s language. The BJP is a party whose principal strength lies in the Hindi belt. It should not be enforced on people who, quite correctly, refuse to accept that it is superior to their own millennia old languages. National parties, be it the BJP or the Congress, have always pushed for Hindi as the sole language. For a party to be dominant at the Centre, it must be popular among the Indian Union’s Hindi speakers. Poor, largely Hindi-speaking states continue to be poor and the English-educated Southern states that are economically well off with their higher tax contribution are being saddled with Hindi, which in a federal system is unfair.
It is the regional parties that have upheld the principle of federalism and local language. India has a legacy of many distinct languages evolved over millennia with a rich history and literature spoken by millions of citizens. In recent years, however, there has been a growing and consistent push towards making Hindi the primary language of communication and now employment. Hindutva’s prominent slogan from the early years of independent India was “HINDI, HINDU, HINDUSTAN”. The role of a language and the idea behind the formation of linguistic states acknowledging their distinctiveness was to unify our nation. Straitjacketing a linguistic and culturally rich pluralistic nation like India is flawed.
H.N. Ramakrishna
Bengaluru, Karnataka
Imposition of Hindi on Non-Hindi Speaking People
This refers to your Cover Story “Renewed Attempts to Impose Hindi Enrage Southern States” by Mr. Abdul Bari Masoud (Radiance Viewsweekly, 12 November, 2022).
Hindi has been imposed on non-Hindi speaking people by the BJP and Congress-led Union governments since 1947. Taxes of non-Hindi speaking people have been used to promote and impose Hindi. We non-Hindi speaking people simply do not like Hindi. Nehru added the notorious Article 351 in the Constitution to destroy all non-Hindi languages and BJP is now his successor.
We want all languages in the eighth schedule of the Constitution to be official languages of the Government of India and national languages of the Union of India. Non-Hindi speaking people should fight tooth and nail against imposition of Hindi and to protect the dignity of their mother tongues.
K. Pal
Kolkata, West Bengal