Is it a slip in Hindi by the Prime Minister or bureaucratic negligence?

The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting of the Government of India has published an official book in which, on the very back cover page, a message from the Hon’ble Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi regarding the Indian women’s team winning the ICC Women’s World Cup has been included. In this message, the Prime Minister is quoted at the end as saying that our women players have created history by winning the Kabaddi World Cup.

In this short statement written in Hindi, only these two sentences appear in Devanagari script. The sentences in between have been written in a bizarre mixture of Devanagari and Roman scripts—an odd linguistic concoction that is not permitted by the Constitution of India.

The Constitution of India is absolutely clear on this matter: the official language (Rajbhasha) Hindi shall be written in Devanagari script. This means that Hindi cannot be written in Roman script. Then why did the bureaucracy deliberately make such a mistake in a statement attributed to the Hon’ble Prime Minister Narendra Modi? This lapse is unconstitutional.

Reading this printed statement, it appears that the Prime Minister probably did not write it himself. Had he done so, he would never have used Roman script in the middle of Hindi, because he is far more conscious than most about India’s culture and civilization and is also extremely careful about constitutional provisions.

It seems more likely that the Prime Minister spoke these words on some occasion. While speaking, Hindi often becomes “Hinglish,” and he might have used two or three English words like “action” within his Hindi speech. However, instead of converting those spoken words into Devanagari Hindi or Devanagari English or translating them into Hindi, forcing Roman script into the middle of Devanagari in a statement attributed to the Prime Minister an affront to the dignity of his office and has also tarnished the image of the official language.

On condition of anonymity, an official of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting said that arbitrary ad-hoc appointments, increasing workload on permanent officers, negligence in publication work and sidelining of talented professionals are responsible for such lapses.

This is a serious mistake on the part of the officials of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. In matters of language, the Ministries of Home Affairs, Education, Culture and Information & Broadcasting are expected to be particularly vigilant. If such errors occur there, other ministries may begin to imitate them. A detailed journalistic investigation into the matter is ongoing.