PM's address in Hindi

Sir, - Your Editorial ``Raising India's profile'' (TheHindu, Sept. 11) is right on all the points it has touched, including that of Mr. Vajpayee addressing the United Nations summit in Hindi instead of, as you have pithily put it, ``in the impact- laden English''. With due deference to the now almost universally acclaimed qualities of Mr. Vajpayee's head and heart, I, for one, will put it on record that whenever he comes to Chennai and Tamil Nadu he addresses gatherings in English more out of political compulsions than otherwise. From my experience of over three decades of acquaintance with the people from politics of Mr. Vajpayee's persuasion, I can very well say that when any of them speaks to you in English (especially when you do not know Hindi), they do it as a gesture of condescension and not as a matter of courtesy. Their pride and arrogance born of their own notions of patriotism in this respect are unmistakable.

All this, when the Constitution continues to recognise English as one of the Union official languages and when Hindi remains only the language of a major group and not the language of India's majority population. Non-Hindi speaking population continues to outnumber those whose mother tongue is Hindi and yet they are to be treated as second class citizens only when it comes to the question of Union official language.

Mr. Vajpayee missed a wonderful opportunity to show himself as belonging to the whole of India, if not to the world as a whole, when he showed his narrow-mindedness in choosing to address the U.N. in Hindi and not in English, as if he were a taller patriot than Jawaharlal Nehru or Mahatma Gandhi. You are cent per cent right in saying that ``it was quite incongruous'' that Mr. Vajpayee should have addressed the U.N. in Hindi now.

K. Vedamurthy,

Chennai

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