Nepal plunges into politics of languages

By Dhruba Adhikary

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KG09Df01.html

KATHMANDU - The issue of official language(s) has never been as sensitive in Nepal as it is now. While the interim statute maintains the continuity of Nepali, in Devnagari script, as the language of official communication, some members of the 601-strong Constituent Assembly want to add 11 more languages to the list, giving them the same status, while others are advocating for the addition of Hindi.

Otherwise, the members will resort to writing "notes of dissent", unwittingly using an English expression to press their point. One contention is that since Nepal is now a republic, it should adopt a language policy to de-link the country's monarchical past.

If all 11 languages gain equal status with Nepali as demanded, that will still leave Nepal's 60 other languages and dialects, which
are spoken by just 1% of the population in a country of over 25 million people, off the list.

But does Nepal have the required resource-base to have a dozen official languages? Yes, it is possible, said commentator Shyam Shrestha. Since democracy requires equality, the state should be prepared to pay a concomitant price for it, he said in a recent newspaper article.

Countries often cited for their liberal language policies are Switzerland, Canada, India and South Africa. Post-apartheid South Africa, for example, has accepted 11 languages to address some ethnic communities. But with the passage of time, English, although fifth on the list, has emerged as the most preferred language there. Efforts to promote Afrikaans as the first language have not produced encouraging results.

Nepali, an offspring of Sanskrit, is the mother tongue of 49% of the population and has been in use for official communication for centuries. In Nepal's neighborhood and beyond it is also called Gorkhali, a name derived to identify it with the world famous Gurkha soldiers. It is a language with an enriched vocabulary, grammar and literature. Besides being the official language, Nepali has provided a link between and among communities speaking local languages and dialects.

It is understood and spoken, with local accents and variations, in all 4,000-plus villages and towns that make up the present-day Nepal. No other language has this level of outreach.

Credit - or discredit - for having agitated the public to protest the perceived domination of the Nepali language goes to the Maoists. The Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), led by Prachanda, whose nine-month premiership ended in May, has found it expedient to extend support to those who insist that the new constitution must recognize all 12 languages as official ones.

Assembly member Barshaman Pun, affiliated to the Maoists, told the panel that all remaining languages should be included in the annex of the statute. He also wanted the words "people's war" to be included in the preamble of the new statute so that the armed Maoist insurgency (1996-2006) will be remembered by future generations. Members belonging to other parties insisted that the period be described only as an "armed conflict".

In their initial effort to mobilize masses in favor of the "people's war", as they chose to call it, Maoist leaders issued slogans and promises that they would provide autonomous states "with the right to self-determination" on the basis of ethnicity, language or religion. Scholars and analysts see this as the main contradiction in the Maoist scheme.

If they were true communists they would have made it a class war - a battle to seek justice for poor and downtrodden people, irrespective of ethnicity or caste. They found it useful to go after catchy slogans without anticipating that their moves would eventually create divisions in society and threaten the integrity of Nepal as a nation state.

The persistent demand to turn Nepal's entire flatland, called Terai, in the south bordering India into one state is being backed by over two-dozen armed groups. There is a credible threat of separation should the current demand for statehood not be met.

Some of the Maoist leaders do accept, in private conversation, that they made some serious mistakes along the way but now find no agreeable way to rectify them. In the absence of a face-saving device, they don't want to backtrack from their declared objectives in public. On the day Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam chief Velupillai Prabhakaran was killed in Sri Lanka this year, Prachanda himself publicly alluded to the case of Sri Lanka, where the Tamil-speaking community fought a protracted civil war that ended in tragedy.

At the start, Maoists did not realize that they were opening a Pandora's box. And they also did not learn lessons from events in the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere. Now they are in the midst of a host of issues for which there is no durable or sustainable solution. The language issue is one such example. Of the 72 languages that are spoken in the country, some have numerous sub-groups.

Some scholars of the Rai community in the eastern hills, for instance, have discovered 28 variations of the Rai language, with speakers of each group wanting their dialect to receive identical treatment from the state. The Sherpa community, which provides high-altitude guides to mountaineers attempting to scale Everest and other Himalayan peaks, is uncomfortable over purported moves to marginalize their language to bestow a higher status to a language used by recent immigrants from Tibet. But people living in the foothills of snow-capped mountains in the northern belt have not lost their cool, and are not making much noise.

The situation is quite different in the southern belt, which shares porous borders with India's Bihar state - known for lawlessness - and Uttar Pradesh state, with a large population, among others. Small political parties, with loaded regional overtones, suddenly felt strong enough to demand that Hindi, spoken mainly in northern India and popularized by India's Mumbai-based film industry, be given the status enjoyed by Nepali. This happened on the eve of the national polls of April 2008 that were held to elect the constituent assembly.

Existing regional parties were emboldened with the sudden emergence of new parties, mainly consisting of disgruntled leaders from the mainstream national parties such as Nepali Congress and the Unified Marxist Leninist (UML), which is considered a moderate communist group when compared with the Maoists.

Media reports claimed the new political parties were floated - ahead of the crucial election - with moral and material support from the south; but official India promptly denied such reports and allegations.

Those who have appeared vocal in the constituent assembly debate belong to these newly formed parties, and have inserted the dissenting opinion with the demand that Hindi too be made an official language like Nepali. Their main argument is that since most Nepalis watch Hindi films and enjoy listening to Hindi music there should not be any hesitation to accept it as an official Nepal language.

Upendra Yadav, head of the Madhesi Janaadhikar Forum, a Terai-based party, said that given neighboring India already included Nepali in its list of recognized languages, Nepal needs to reciprocate the gesture by accepting Hindi on this side of the border. But he denied charges that he was speaking as a spokesman for India.

"English is the language of science and development," said Birendra Yadav, a lawyer based in the border town of Birgunj. In a written comment published recently he argued that should the government decide to make additional investments in language it must do so to enhance younger people's accessibility to English, not Hindi. India itself has flourished because of the use of English.
Ram Chandra Jha, a former minister representing the moderate Unified Marxist Leninist party, suspects that the idea to make Hindi a link language in Nepal could be a ploy to weaken the roots of the Maithili language on the Indian side. Maithili's status in Nepal is higher than in India. In other words, promoters of Hindi in India might have a hand in Nepal's campaign in order to preempt any identical demands on the Indian side of the border.

With this compelling argument, Jha and his fellow UML leaders have convinced the party's central leadership that Nepali alone should be given official language status in Nepal. Nepali Congress, the other party among the three big parties, also holds the position that it is only Nepali that deserves to be the lingua franca of Nepal.

Language experts do not consider Hindi's case as a tenable proposition as the percentage of the population using Hindi as its mother tongue is 0.47%. To enjoy Hindi movies and music, which is done even in America and Europe, cannot be a basis to accept it as a serious language of mass communication. Hindi, although given national language status in India, is not widely used. Television viewers have seen Indian Interior Minister P Chidambaram handling Hindi questions in English. English continues to be the language of Indian law courts.

If Hindi is accepted as an official language this would pose a direct threat to Terai's existing regional languages such as Maithili, Bhojpuri, Avadhi and Thaaru, they contend. In the view of Professor Madhav Prasad Pokharel of Tribhuwan University, to entertain the current advocacy being made for Hindi would spark the highly sensitive issue of nationalism. Languages, he said, need to be placed in four categories: mother tongues of all communities; the link language, which is Nepali; cultural languages such as Sanskrit, used by Hindus and Buddhists alike for religious rites and Arabic/Urdu which are essential for Muslims; and English.

All mother tongues deserve preservation, Nepali should be allowed to function as the official and link language, cultural languages must be inserted on the list of recognized languages and English be formally accepted as the language of international communication. There is no role or room for Hindi as it stands now.

Meanwhile, leaders of various ethnic communities appear to have realized that the Nepali language is one vital foundation to establish the collective identity of the diverse ethnic groups that make up Nepal.

Dhruba Adhikary is a Kathmandu-based journalist.