Trends of Political Disintegration as Consequences of the Language Rights Movement across South Asia

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Trends of Political Disintegration as Consequences of the Language Rights Movement across South AsiaSouth Asia, as a linguistic region, has been home to more than two thousand languages belonging to the Indo-Aryan, Tibeto-Burman, Austro-Asiatic, and Dravidian groups of languages. The languages belonging to the latter three groups have been shaped by the former for over one thousand years, rupturing the ethnolinguistic boundaries of the minority speech communities. Consequently, this process has given prominence to Indo-Aryan languages, like Bangla, Hindi, Urdu, Sinhalese, Punjabi, Nepali, etc., over the languages of minority speech communities. In the event of the creation of the republic in a postcolonial setting after the end of the Indian Independence movement, the question of languages comes to the surface in the political scenario. Evidently, the Indian independence movement encompasses a wide variety of senses of liberation, from language rights to economic emancipation, leading to many later political upheavals in South Asian countries. The sense of language rights left by this movement, compounded with a sense of nationhood, religion, and ethnicity, caused a trend of political disintegration across South Asian countries. Hence, the trend of political disintegration manifesting in South Asian countries has been a persistent postcolonial phenomenon.

Hence, the sense of language rights can be characterized by the feeling of the speech communities that their speech varieties have equal status with the languages of status, like Hindi, Sinhalese, and Urdu, recognized as official languages by constitutional laws. Thus, the direction of the sense of language rights can be described as the dynamism yielded by government policy in undermining a particular speech variety and the recognition of a regional speech variety as the language of status. In the postcolonial political context, we find several cases of political maneuvers that have recognized some speech varieties as languages but undermined some other languages of majority-speech communities.

At the event of independence, the newly emerged countries, India, Nepal, erstwhile Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, required official languages to build their republics, which, respectively, adopted Hindi, Nepali, Urdu, and Sinhalese as the official languages, leading to multiple language problems. We can see the government policies of Sri Lanka and Nepal, which, respectively, adopted language policies in 1956 and 1970 that undermined the languages of minority speech communities spoken in those countries. On the other hand, there is an instance of recognizing some speech varieties as languages through the Landmarking States Reorganization Acts of 1956 in India. Given the above backdrop as to the language problems, this article highlights the trend of political disintegrations manifested due to the language rights movements in terms of regional autonomy, the movement for cessation, and irredentism, as in the following:

The movement for regional autonomy grew out of the sense of language rights and has now been diffusing throughout South Asia. It is now pushing the polities to recognize regional autonomy across South Asia. The creation of 14 language-based states under the States Reorganization Acts 1956 in India was the first instance of giving regional autonomy aligned with the cause of language rights. This kind of regional autonomy also includes the recognition of new languages in Nepal, endorsed by the 1990s constitution of Nepal, preceded by a decade-long civil war.

The sense of language rights that led to the movement for cessation includes the Bangla language rights movement in 1952 in erstwhile Pakistan, as a consequence of which Bangladesh emerged as a new language-based nation through the cessation in 1971. The Tibeto-Burman speech communities of northeastern states, e.g., Nagaland and Manipur in India, bear a sense of language rights and have been struggling for cessation from India. The other such speech community is the Baloch in Pakistan, who have been struggling for cessation from Pakistan since the independence of Pakistan from British India in 1947.

Other than the sense of regional autonomy and cessation, a widespread trend of political disintegration, called irredentism, prevails among the speech communities residing across the border. Some speech communities inhabiting across international borders share the characteristics of nationhood, e.g., speakers of Bangla, Pashto, Tamil, and Nepali who bear a sense of irredentism. Due to the prevalence of such a sense of irredentism over the integration of the Pashto-speaking region of Pakistan into Afghanistan, there has been a long-standing diplomatic upheaval between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The serious consequence of such irredentism is the instance of the Kashmiris, which implies the integration of Indian-controlled Kashmir with Pakistan through the cessation of Indian control. Similarly, a sense of irredentism exists over the integration of Tamil-speaking Jaffna in Sri Lanka with Tamil Nadu in India.

From the above discussion, it can be concluded that the trend of political disintegration that emerged out of a sense of language rights across South Asian countries has been a postcolonial phenomenon that is yet to manifest with vigor in the coming days.

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