Bhubaneswar: The state leadership along with major national and regional parties from the state, Sunday, expressed their views on the proposal of Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s ‘One Nation, One Language’ plan.
While the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) tried to play it down, most of the other parties opposed the idea of imposition of Hindi in non-Hindi speaking states. Biju Janata Dal (BJD) and the Congress strongly opposed the alleged plan to impose Hindi on all states.
Veteran BJD leader Prasanna Acharya, Sunday, said that dignity of all languages should be preserved. He told reporters, “India is a multilingual country. The country is enriched with different languages in different parts of the country. We have to work towards giving importance to all regional languages. We need to do justice to the love and respect people have for their own language.”
The Congress, on the other hand, accused Union Home Minister Amit Shah of imposing Hindi on all states and said the people of the state would not tolerate any such move which can attack their own language.
Congress leader Tara Prasad Bahinipati said, “The imposition of Hindi is an attempt to get domination over other regional languages. This is not in favour of the country. We do have respect for the national language. But the people of Odisha are not going to tolerate this attack on their language.”
The BJP, on the other side, tried to play it safe and claimed that except South India almost all other states have accepted Hindi. BJP leader Pradeep Purohit, while speaking on the issue, however said that the proposal of the Union Home Minister is in no way an attempt to demean any other regional language.
“The Hindi language is spoken in larger parts of the country. This can help to unite the nation. There are some people who are against the use of Hindi but all other languages will be equally respected,” he said.
