This case was a challenge by Smt. Varshatai, a former member of the Patur Municipal Council in Akola, Maharashtra, to the use of Urdu on official Municipal Council signpost. The said signboard displayed “Municipal Council, Patur", in Marathi at the top, with its translation below in the Urdu language. The matter came to the Courts after Smt. Varshatai’s requisition to abstain from the use of Urdu on the Municipal Council signposts was rejected by a majority resolution on February 14, 2020, on the ground that the use of Urdu was in practice since long (1956 onwards), and that a significant section of the population was Urdu-speaking. This rejection was challenged before various fora culminating in the present judgment of the Supreme Court. The Court emphatically upheld the usage of Urdu on Municipal Council’s signees and rejected the principal argument put forward by the petitioner that the Maharashtra Local Authorities (Official Languages) Act, 2022 only permitted the use of Marathi. The Court’s reasoning was grounded in constitutional norms around linguistic diversity per Article 345, which permits respective states to adopt one or more languages for official purposes.
In Defence of Urdu
Urdu is a sustained target as Hindutva nationalism continues to project Hindi and Hinduism in opposition to Urdu and Islam. Nowhere is this more apparent than the renaming spree by BJP of historic places to erase its Muslim past. In Uttar Pradesh, Mughal Sarai Junction has become Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyay Railway Station and Allahabad is Prayagraj. This renaming, as part of an unceasing propaganda of the Sangh Parivar, is meant to normalize the understanding that Urdu is alien and anti-Hindu. This violence against the Urdu language serves as a proxy for hate and discrimination against Muslims.
Amidst this rising tide of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim prejudice, the Supreme Court judgment asserting Urdu’s deep roots in the country’s linguistic heritage and constitutional imagination comprehensively dispels the Hindutva lie that Urdu is alien.
The Court disposes the exclusivity argument of the petitioner based on the Maharashtra Local Authorities (Official Languages) Act, 2022, and then launches into a powerful defence of the country’s linguistic diversity and cultural coexistence noting that “language is the yardstick to measure the civilizational march of a community and its people” and in the case of Urdu it is the “finest specimen of ganga-jamuni tahzeeb, or the Hindustani tahzeeb, which is the composite cultural ethos of the plains of northern and central India”. In arriving at this conclusion the Court also underlines that language “belongs to a community, to a region, to people; and not to a religion”.
The Court calls upon the people to “respect and rejoice in our diversity, including our many languages” noting that Urdu is very much included in the list of languages in the VIII Schedule to the Constitution (at Entry 22), and is the sixth most spoken scheduled language of India and is “spoken by at least a part of the population in all States and Union Territories, except perhaps in our north-eastern states”.
The Court also notes that the Urdu language has come to be adopted by many States and Union Territories as the second official language in exercise of powers conferred by Article 345 of the Constitution. The States which have Urdu as one of the official languages are Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal, while the Union Territories which follow this practice are Delhi and Jammu and Kashmir.
The Court also makes a telling comment that the language used by the common people of the country is replete with words of the Urdu language, even if one is not aware of it. “It would not be incorrect to say that one cannot have a day-to-day conversation in Hindi without using words of Urdu or words derived from Urdu”, concludes the Court while acknowledging that the exchange of vocabulary flows both ways because Urdu also has many words borrowed from other Indian languages, including Sanskrit.
In what seems an education for the ignorant, the Court recalls that according to linguists and literary scholars, Urdu and Hindi are not two languages, but one language and as such “when we criticize Urdu, we are in a way also criticizing Hindi”.
The Supreme Court then comprehensively debunks the Sangh Parivar’s propaganda that Urdu is an alien language, and by extension Muslims too. The Court holds: “The prejudice against Urdu stems from the misconception that Urdu is alien to India. This opinion, we are afraid, is incorrect as Urdu, like Marathi and Hindi, is an Indo-Aryan language. It is a language which was born in this land. Urdu developed and flourished in India due to the need for people belonging to different cultural milieus who wanted to exchange ideas and communicate amongst themselves. Over the centuries, it attained ever greater refinement and became the language of choice for many acclaimed poets”.
In this sense, this is a brave judgment for the manner in which it explicitly confronts untruthful majoritarian propaganda about Urdu, and especially since it comes at a time of state-sanctioned endeavours to demonise paint Urdu as an alien language introduced by Muslim invaders. This judgment is nothing short of a judicial rebuff to the efforts to denigrate Urdu.
In Defence of Linguistic Diversity and Tolerance
The Court underlines India’s linguistic diversity and its status as the most multilingual country in the world, acknowledging that “we, the people of India, have taken great pain in resolving the language issue at the Centre, which is our unique achievement considering the linguistic diversity of the nation”. Importantly, even as Hindi imposition threatens linguistic autonomy, the Supreme Court has reiterated the need to celebrate this linguistics diversity, holding that: “We must respect and rejoice in our diversity, including our many languages. India has more than a hundred major languages. Then there are other languages known as dialects or ‘mother tongues’ which also run into hundreds.”
Acknowledging that language is “both sensitive and delicate”, the Court crucially brings into play what it terms the one of the “principal Constitutional values” of “tolerance”.
In stating so, the Court has merely reiterated what Justice Chinnappa Reddy held in Bijoe Emmanuel vs. State of Kerala [(1986) 3 SCC 615]: “Our tradition teaches tolerance; our philosophy preaches tolerance; our Constitution practises tolerance; let us not dilute it.” Of relevance to is wat the Court held In Tehseen Poonawala vs Union of India [(2018) 9 SCC 501] too: “Pluralism and tolerance are essential virtues and constitute the building blocks of a truly free and democratic society. It must be emphatically stated that a dynamic contemporary constitutional democracy imbibes the essential feature of accommodating pluralism in thought and approach so as to preserve cohesiveness and unity. Intolerance arising out of a dogmatic mindset sows the seeds of upheaval and has a chilling effect on freedom of thought and expression. Hence, tolerance has to be fostered and practised and not allowed to be diluted in any manner.”
Upholding Linguistic Citizenship
The Supreme Court holds that “a Municipal Council is there to provide services to the local community of the area and cater to their immediate day-to-day needs”, and so “if people or a group of people, residing within the area covered by the Municipal Council are familiar with Urdu, then there should not be any objection if Urdu is used in addition to the official language”. In effect, the Supreme Court has upheld the right of people to participate in public life through their own language, what Christopher Stroud has described as “linguistic citizenship”. In doing so the Court has rejected a narrow exclusivist interpretation of language usage for public consumption and upheld an inclusive broader use of language to communicate as per demographic needs.
What makes the present judgment all the more important, is that this seal of imprimatur against narrow exclusivist language chauvinism is from the Supreme Court, and now constitutes the law of the land.
Conclusion
This judgment, coming on the heels of the judgment of the Supreme Court in the Tamil Nadu Governor’s case and followed by the interim order in the Waqf matter, reaffirms the crucial duty of the Courts as the final arbiter of the Constitution to uphold Constitutional principles instead of being remotely guided by majoritarian view or popular perception.
Interestingly, this is not the first time that the Supreme court was required to consider the legality of the use of Urdu language for official purpose. Previously, a Constitution Bench in Uttar Pradesh Hindi Sahitya Sammelan v. State of Uttar Pradesh [(2014) 9 SCC 716] upheld the declaration of Urdu as the second language in Uttar Pradesh. However, this second time around, the Supreme Court has gone beyond approving its usage. It has set about locating Urdu in the context of Indian and constitutional history, while interpreting its usage from the lived realities of India's diverse linguistic demography and the principal Constitutional values of diversity and tolerance. This is not a judgment simpliciter – it is a resounding reaffirmation of the founding principles of the country – fraternity and pluralism – as also the linguistic diversity and multilingualism underlying the Constitution against any attempt to impose exclusivity, monolingualism and uniformity.
(The article is an abridged version of the statement issued by AILAJ)
