Sharpening his attack on the Modi government on the language issue, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin on Tuesday said the largesse for Sanskrit and the pittance for Tamil and other south Indian languages in financial allocation has exposed the BJP’s deep-rooted bias.
“Sanskrit gets the crores; Tamil and other South Indian languages get nothing but crocodile tears. While all the money is for Sanskrit, it is a deceptive show of love for Tamil,” he wrote on X, citing a media report on the huge funding for Sanskrit while the allocation for Tamil as well as other southern tongues and Odia, which are classical languages, is insignificant.
Tamil was declared and designated a Classical Language in 2004, while Sanskrit was accorded that status only a year later in 2005. Subsequently, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam and Odiya joined that elite league. However, the funding for the development of these languages clearly displays a bias in favour of Sanskrit as it had got the lion’s share.
For the promotion of Sanskrit, the Union Government spent Rs 2532.59 crore in the decade from 2014-15 to 2024-25, which is 17 times more than the total allocation of Rs 147.56 crore for all the other five classical languages.
The ruling DMK and Tamil scholars have long maintained that Tamil is being given a raw deal while Sanskrit is favoured. It has become part of the DMK’s narrative to debunk the BJP’s claim of Prime Minister Narendra Modi striving to promote Tamil. While Sanskrit has received Rs 230.24 crore on an average per year, it was Rs 13.41 crore for the other five.
During his many visits to the state and even at the United Nations, Modi had asserted that Tamil is the oldest language and the Union Government had organised Kashi Tamil Sangamam, but the DMK and its allies have punched holes in the saffron party’s attempt to appropriate the language to gain political mileage.
Further, the DMK government in the state had been steadfastly opposed to the Three-language formula, a cornerstone of the New Education Policy (NEP). Since Tamil Nadu had been following the two-language formula of Mother Tongue (Tamil) and English, it has rejected the NEP as a tool of imposing Hindi through the backdoor.
The state government had moved the Supreme Court to secure the release of funds under the SSA programme, withheld by the Union Education Ministry on the pretext that Tamil Nadu is not coming on board to implement the NEP.