The row over the three-language formula under the New Educational Policy (NEP) has been hotting up in recent days. The latest move came on March 13, when the Government of Tamil Nadu under Chief Minister M K Stalin replaced the Devanagari rupee symbol with a Tamil letter in its logo for the budget 2025-26.
The TN government under Stalin has already rejected the NEP and the chief minister has accused the Centre of trying to impose Hindi on the state.
Alongside, Stalin has also called for a meeting of political leaders on ‘delimitation’ on March 22. Delimitation is an exercise intended to redraw and reallocate parliamentary constituency boundaries, something not done since the 1970s.
As the political discourse veers towards issues of federalism, linguistic diversity, language imposition and state rights, one must remember that all this is not new. Back in the 1960s, Tamil Nadu, the then state of Madras, became the crucible for a strident agitation against what its proponents said was the imposition of Hindi on an area that did not speak the language.
One of the towering leaders of the agitation was Conjeevaram Natarajan Annadurai, ‘Anna’ to his followers.
Born in a weaver’s family on September 15, 1909, in the then Madras Presidency, Anna was a brilliant orator and writer who entered politics in 1935. He joined forces with the South’s great social reformer, Periyar, although the two later split and Anna formed his own party, the Dravida Munnetra Kazahagam in 1949.
But it was in April 1962 that Anna made one of the most important speeches of his career. It was his maiden speech in the Rajya Sabha. Delivered in English (he had once been an English teacher), it had members of the House discussing it long after Anna delivered it.
Anna was responding to the Motion of Thanks to the President’s Address to the Session of Parliament in April 1962. The President of India then was Babu Rajendra Prasad.
He spoke at length about ‘democracy, socialism and nationalism’. It is his views about nationalism that arouse much interest.
For Anna, India was not truly a ‘nation’ but, as he said later in the speech, a ‘subcontinent’. And he said so: “Sir, may I, even at the expense of being misunderstood, point out that the very term “national integration” is a contradiction in terms. People integrated become a nation and if they become a nation, where is the necessity for integration? Therefore, that term ‘national integration’ shows the poverty of ideas which has been holding us up all this time. I would, therefore, say this: let us rethink. We have a Constitution, of course. Stalwarts of this country sat and devised the Constitution. But the time has come for a re-thinking, for a reappraisal, for a re-valuation and for a re-interpretation of the word ‘nation’.”
This point was followed by his emphasis on being ‘different’ but ‘not in an antagonistic way’.
“I claim Sir, to come from a country, a part in India now, but which I think is of a different stock, not necessarily antagonistic. I belong to the Dravidian stock. I am proud to call myself a Dravidian. That does not mean that I am against a Bengali or a Maharashtrian or a Gujarati. As Robert Burns has stated, “A man is a man for all that”. I say that I belong to the Dravidian stock and that is only because I consider that the Dravidians have got something concrete, something distinct, something different to offer to the nation at large. Therefore, it is that we want self-determination.”
Anna was at pains to stress that the separation of the south need not be like the bloody Partition that had singed the Subcontinent just 16 years ago.
“The fact that we want separation is not to be misconstrued as being antagonistic. Of course, I can understand the feelings that would very naturally arise in the minds of people in the northern area, whenever they think of partition. I know the terrible consequences of partition and I am deeply sympathetic towards them. But our separation is entirely different from the partition which has brought about Pakistan. I would even say that if sympathetic treatement is afforded, there need be no heat generated. There would not be any dire consequences. Fortunately, the South itself is a sort of a geographical unit. We call it the Deccan plateau or the peninsula. There will not be a large number of people migrating from this place to that. There will not be any refugee problem. I would ask you to very calmly bestow deep and sympathetic thought on the problem.”
On being asked by N N Lingam from Madras as to why shouldn’t self-determination be granted to all Indian states, Anna replied: “Well, my Hon. Friend can advocate that. I am pleading for separation of Dravida Nadu not because of any antagonism but because, if it is separated, it will become a small nation, compact, homogenous and united, wherein sections of people in the whole area can have a community of sentiment. Then we can make economic regeneration more effective and social regeneration more fruitful.”
Towards the end of his speech, Annadurai stressed that he was “pleading for a national cause, not for parochialism, not for party principle. I want that this great State of ours should have self-determination, so that it can contribute its mite to the whole world, because, Sir, we have got a culture peculiar to us.”
“I am reminded, Sir, of your very scholarly statement made some time ago that India is united because Rama and Krishna are being worshipped and venerated from the Himalayas right up to Cape Comorin. So too is Jesus held in respect and veneration throughout the world. Yet you have nation-states in Europe and new and newer nation states are coming up in the world,” he added.
C N Annadurai later relinquished his demand for a separate Dravida Nadu in the wake of the Sino-Indian War and other developments.
But while the demand may have gone, undercurrents of aggrievements still linger, all of which have come up to the surface now in the form of the row over the NEP and delimitation.