Guwahati, March 24 -- The dispute between the Central Government and the Tamil Nadu Government over the former's purported move to impose Hindi on the southern state, allegedly through the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, has once again exposed one of the nation's major fault lines - the linguistic divide. It is well-established that while enriching the country's cultural mosaic, language (along with caste, ethnicity, and religion) has also contributed to political complexities, often with severe consequences.

The violent language movements of the 1950s and 1960s in many parts of the country, particularly in the southern states, against the imposition of Hindi and in defense of regional languages, stand as a testament to this harsh ...