English no more foreign, it must be link language forever: Shetty

CHENNAI: Retired IAS officer and former Vice-Chancellor of the Indian Maritime University, K Ashok Vardhan Shetty, on Saturday strongly opposed the imposition of Hindi and asserted that English must be recognised as the permanent link language of India.

Shetty argued that history had proved India’s unity lies not in linguistic uniformity but in embracing diversity. “None of the essentials of Indian cuisine, from potatoes and tomatoes to coffee and tea, are native to India. They were introduced just a few centuries ago, yet today they are integral to our culture. Similarly, English is no longer a foreign tongue. After 250 years, it is very much an Indian language,” he said.

He emphasised that both Hindi and English are equally foreign in origin, Hindi belonging to the Indo-Aryan family and Tamil to the Dravidian family, but insisted that “the issue is not foreignness, but usefulness.” English, he said, had proved indispensable as the global lingua franca, a medium of higher education, diplomacy, and even India’s freedom struggle.

Calling the National Education Policy 2020’s three-language formula “unrealistic and unwise,” Shetty urged that schools focus on strengthening literacy in the mother tongue and English. He proposed scrapping the three-language requirement, expanding the Eighth Schedule to recognise more languages.