Urdu is the real ‘North Indian imposition’, not Hindi: Somehow MNS goons, Uddhav Sena leaders, Dravidian-Tamil politicians to Kannada warriors of Congress, everyone seems to ignore the fact

Linguistic chauvinism and hooliganism, have been an opprobrious element of the Indian socio-political landscape. In yet another incidence of self-declared preservers of the Marathi language, Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) workers assaulted a 48-year-old sweetshop owner in Mumbai’s Mira Road suburb on 29th June 2025. The incident sparked state-wide outrage over escalating language-based violence and the tacit endorsement of such tactics by regional parties, especially the ones with negligible political standing seeking to fetch some relevance.

The victim, Babulal Khimji Chaudhary, owner of Jodhpur Sweets and Namkeen, was targeted when seven MNS members, including identified assaulters Karan Kandangire (MNS deputy city chief), Pamod Nilekat (Vaahtuk Sena district organiser), and Akshay Dalvi (MNS worker), Sachin Salunkhe and Amol Patil, and others entered his shop demanding transactions in Marathi. The confrontation escalated when Chaudhary questioned their claim that the state assembly mandated Marathi usage in businesses and that the shopkeeper needs to hire all Marathi-speaking staff by a government order.

Marathi pride or politically driven linguistic hooliganism?: Regional parties using language as a tool to regain their diminutive political relevance

While the outrage over such blatant language-based harassment was yet to subside, the accused MNS workers were detained, interrogated, and released on bail in no time. Maharashtra has been a hotbed of linguistic aggression, where regional parties like MNS, and Shiv Sena (UBT) among others have long claimed to champion Marathi pride. However, their pursuit of protecting ‘Marathi Asmita’ has been more about dominating, harassing, and assaulting innocent non-Marathi speakers who are simply minding their own business.

Just days back, Shiv Sena (UBT) supremo Uddhav Thackeray and MNS chief Raj Thackeray invoked the unity of ‘Marathi Manoos’ after the BJP-led government rolled back its government resolutions (GRs) on the introduction of Hindi in state schools. To turn things more dramatic, Uddhav Thackeray, joined by Sanjay Raut, burnt the copies of the said GR.

Maharashtra is home to people with diverse linguistic backgrounds, the heart of the Hindi film industry Bollywood, while the common Marathis are essentially not in support of intimidating and excluding non-Marathi speakers in the state, regional parties, especially MNS which has zero assembly seats but infinite arrogance, has been at the forefront of stoking linguistic tensions.

The ruling BJP-led government, however, has taken a mature stand and condemned violence against non-Marathi speakers in the name of Marathi pride. During a media interaction on 4th July, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said, “It is not wrong to be proud of the Marathi language in Maharashtra. But if someone indulges in hooliganism due to language, we will not tolerate it. If someone beats up people on the basis of language, this will not be tolerated. The police have filed an FIR and taken action on the incident, and if anyone creates such a language dispute in future, legal action will be taken.”

“We are proud of our Marathi, but injustice cannot be done to any language of India in this manner; we will have to keep this in mind. And sometimes I am surprised that these people embrace English and create disputes over Hindi. What kind of thinking is this and what kind of action is this? Therefore, strict action will be taken against those who take the law into their own hands,” he added.

While Hindi, Gujarati and other non-Marathi-speaking migrant workers and residents are harassed and assaulted by political goons, what remains a less-discussed aspect of linguistic politics is the curious exemption of Urdu from the ire of such regional language chauvinists. Despite its roots as a product of foreign Islamist imposition, Urdu gets a pass. While Hindi, an Indic language with Sanskrit origins and a shared Devnagri script with Marathi, is vilified as a ‘North Indian Imposition’ by parties like MNS, Shiv Sena (UBT), DMK and ‘Dravidian’ parties in Tamil Nadu, and Congress-backed Kannada language crusaders in Karnataka, Urdu has somehow escaped similar scrutiny.

The DMK government in Tamil Nadu made a huge hue and cry over the National Education Policy (NEP) since it allowed Hindi among others as a third language to be taught in government schools. OpIndia reported earlier, how the state government dubbed the NEP as the Modi government’s tool to impose Hindi on Tamilians even though Hindi is not mandatory and children can opt for any other language other than their mother tongue Tamil and English.

In March this year, a 34-year-old man from Pune, Maharashtra was attacked on a bus in Tamil Nadu by language chauvinists for not speaking in Tamil. Bhushan Mandalik came to Coimbatore to attend the Mahashivratri event at the Isha Yog Centre, he was going to Theni when Tamil language chauvinists asked him if he knew Tamil after Bhushan said that he was from Maharashtra and didn’t know Tamil, following this, he was punched in the face leaving him severely injured.

In Karnataka’s Bengaluru, an Odia restaurant was forced by Kannada ‘language warriors’ to remove Odia nameboard even though a Kannada nameboard was already put up. The Kannada language goon asserted that in Karnataka, the Kannada language and Kannada people should get first priority.

The language row in Karnataka has been simmering for years, with signboard disputes, hooliganism over Hindi signages in the Bengaluru metro in 2017 even though it was perfectly legal to use Hindi signages alongside Kannada and English, and private businesses caught in the crossfire. The fringe groups like Karnataka Rakshana Vedike and political parties like Congress have seized on ‘Kannada pride’ theatrics as a cheap vote-grabbing gimmick, magnifying it into a divisive us-versus-them narrative.

In 2022, the Linguistic department of the Jharkhand Government led by JMM’s Hemant Soren, issued a notification to remove Bhojpuri and Magahi as regional languages for the Dhanbad and Bokaro districts of Jharkhand, while Urdu was retained whereas Hindi was not recognised as a regional language even in any single district. This came even as a significant population spoke Hindi and other tribal languages. A massive uproar had erupted back then and the government was accused of appeasing Muslims.

Interestingly, back in 2023, the self-proclaimed Hindutva party Shiv Sena (UBT) had put up posters and banners in Urdu in a Muslim-dominated area with Uddhav Thackeray designated as Ali Janab Uddhav Thackeray in those posters. Apparently, Urdu is more close to Marathi than Hindi that’s why Hindi is intolerable but Urdu is not.

Even in West Bengal, where the Muslim-appeasing TMC government with a CM having a pathological obsession with fighting Kafirs, Urdu gets special treatment so much so that leaders like Firhad Hakim endorse the Urduisation of the state.

In Telangana too, CM Revanth Reddy launched a vigorous campaign earlier this year to revive Urdu in the state’s education system, even as his government continues its vehement opposition to Hindi a language he dismisses as “imposed.”

Similarly, the Samajwadi Party raised the demand for Urdu translations in UP assemblies, a move CM Yogi Adityanath rightly condemned as an attempt to “make children maulvis” rather than scientists. Meanwhile, AIMIM’s Asaduddin Owaisi weaponizes Urdu as “India’s language of Independence”, whitewashing its divisive history.

Hindi gets hate, Urdu gets embrace: Why an Indic language hurts regional language chauvinists but a language with literal foreign origins is acceptable to them

Language supremacists are outraged over Hindi and accuse the government of imposing the language on them even claiming that the Central government wants to eradicate regional languages like Tamil, Marathi and Kannada, however, they have no problem with Muslim-appeasing political parties patronising and promoting Urdu even to the extent of making it second official language or additional official language. In Uttar Pradesh, the Congress government made Urdu the state’s second official language in 1989 despite massive protests, just to appease its Muslim vote bank. Similar motivation drove state governments to recognise Urdu as a second official or additional official language in West Bengal, Delhi, Telangana and Bihar.

Unlike Hindi, which has its roots in Sanskrit and evolved gradually within the Indian subcontinent, Urdu emerged as a camp language in the court of Islamic invaders, blending Persian, and Arabic with local dialects. If we go into the history of Urdu, it is an imposed language. During the medieval period, Muslim invaders brought Persian and Arabic to the subcontinent. The campaigns were marked not only by territorial conquest but also by Islamic Jihadist barbarism including rape, killings, pillage, destruction of temples, desecration of idols, destroying Hindu culture and inflicting brutalities of all sorts on the local non-Muslim populace, especially their forced conversion to Islam.

Urdu emerged as a hybrid language of communication since the Muslim rulers faced the challenge of communicating with the populace that did not speak Persian (Farsi), Arabic or Turkish. The Mughal tyrants incentivised the use of Urdu, making it somewhat a prerequisite for access to administrative posts and courtly patronage. Urdu was widely promoted by the Mughals even in South India (Deccan), where the language became a lingua franca for intercommunication and came to be known as Dakhani in some areas, especially the Sultanates of Golkunda.

The Urdu language developed in Delhi over their years during Mughal era and further thrived in Lucknow. While the Urdu language is a blend of Farsi and Arabic and is written in Nastaliq form, it essentially uses Hindi grammar, in fact, many language experts opine that without Hindi grammar, Urdu is a just a dialect.

Beyond the glorification in the books authored by Mughal-loving ‘historians’, Urdu’s increased prominence symbolised the oppressor’s authority over the native population which had its own rich linguistic and cultural treasure, rather than voluntary ’embrace’.

Even in the 19th century, Urdu written in Nastaliq script was widely promoted by the Sunni Islamist Deobani Movement. Even after India’s independence in 1947, Urdu’s propagation and glorification persisted through Bollywood and political support to garner Muslim votes since the language was mostly known, spoken and written by the converted descendants of Hindus and other non-Muslim victims of Islamic invaders.

Bollywood lyricists and screenplay writers like Kaifi Azmi, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Javed Akhtar, Salim Khan, and several others played a significant role in mainstreaming Urdu in Hindi cinema, by embedding it along with Islamic religious concepts like Jannat, Hoor, Khuda, Maula, Mehram, even Kafir (infidel, as per Islam) and whatnot in songs, dialogues and stories, to romanticise its aesthetic and Islamic associations. Bollywood’s portrayal of Urdu as a language of sophistication and poetry not only obscured its historical roots which could be traced to Islamic invasion in the medieval era, but also marginalised pure Hindi, by portraying it as less refined.

On one side, Urdu gained prominence in cinema and literature in the post-independence era, and its cultural elevation continued with ‘secular’ state governments recognising it as an official language and allocating massive funds for its promotion. While Urdu enjoys preferential treatment just as the so-called oppressed, suppressed, depressed Muslim minority, the speakers of Hindi and other Indic languages are often at risk of being attacked or harassed by regional language chauvinists.

Be it in Karnataka, Maharashtra or Tamil Nadu, the language ‘warriors’ always target common and innocent migrant people who are simply trying to earn their livelihood. However, they never target Muslims for conversing in Urdu. Do Muslims in Maharashtra offer namaz in Marathi? Earlier this year, a Marathi language ‘warrior’ belonging to the MNS entered a Muslim-dominated neighbourhood and tried forcing people to speak in Marathi. However, he was met with a rather shocking reaction as the local Muslims cornered him and forced him to apologise in Hindi while holding his ears.

Apparently, the Muslim street veto and their tendency to resort to violence using any real or imaginary excuse, the language warriors do not dare to their language on Muslims. Meanwhile, politicians who bend over backwards to appease their Muslim votebank also never target the community for conversing in Urdu.

The attacks on non-state language speakers or outsiders, protests against Hindi and mindless villainisation of the Indic language are symptomatic of a broader disgraceful and divisive trend wherein Indic languages, particularly Hindi, are targeted to assert regional-linguistic dominance, while Urdu, a language foisted by medieval Islamists marauders and later entrenched by colonial and post-colonial policies remains sacrosanct since it is linked to Muslims and they must not be ‘offended’.

The outrage against a language by language chauvinists is directly proportional to the ability of the speaker of the target language to retaliate. Hindus and their religious beliefs are often targeted because the anti-Hindu elements know that doing so will not trigger a violent response, however, even quoting the Islamic text can trigger Sar Tan Se Juda-level outrage from the Muslim community. While Urdu is the real ‘North Indian imposition’, not Hindi, politicians deliberately ignore this common fact, since targeting Urdu does not align with their agenda.

Taking pride in one’s language is not wrong, and people coming to a state or country learning the language of the land is a good gesture, however, imposing one’s language on another, forcing businesses not to put up signboards in their native languages alongside state language is not only unjustified and illegal but also counterproductive. For genuine promotion and preservation of regional languages, constructive efforts should be made, attacking and harrassing people over not knowing Marathi or Kannada or Tamil serves no purpose but to fuel resentment and widen linguistic and cultural divides while the politicians enjoy two seconds of fame and political mileage. In fact, this whole language issue is about petty politics done by politicians to target the Modi government and to gain relevance by invoking regional pride rather than genuine concern for the preservation or promotion of regional languages.

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