Language and opportunity

Of all the daily editorials I had to write during my tenure as the editorial page editor of the Times of India none elicited more hate mail than the one I wrote titled “English is an Indian Language”. This was written in response to a protest hunger strike that Samajwadi Party leader Mulayam Singh Yadav had threatened to stage outside the office of the Union Public Service Commission demanding that examinations for admission into the civil services be conducted only in Indian languages and applicants should no longer be allowed to appear in English. It was one thing to demand examinations in all Indian languages, we argued, and quite another proscribing the English option altogether.