New Delhi: Cockroach Janata Party founder Abhijeet Dipke on 4 July visited Delhi’s Old Rajinder Nagar, a popular UPSC coaching hub. Dipke addressed the aspirants and argued that Hindi-medium candidates should be given preference over English-medium candidates in the civil services examination.
“They talk about Hindi so much that they want to make it a National language but why are they not giving preference to Hindi in UPSC and more people from English medium are clearing it. Why is there a syllabus like this? If you have so much love for Hindi and regional languages, then show it in the paper,” Dipke said from the stage where hundreds of students came to attend his speech.
However, since then, Dipke has been criticised for his speech. In Delhi, the Hindi-medium UPSC hub is Mukherjee Nagar, but in Old Rajinder Nagar, the crowd is mostly from English-medium. And they did not agree with the CJP leader.
“I understand that his intent is in the right place, but he should know what and where he is saying things. Most of the people who were present there were English-medium students. This debate is decades old. You can’t put Hindi vs English debate so casually,” Swati Singh, a UPSC aspirant studying in Old Rajinder Nagar, told ThePrint.
“Abhijeet Dipke is nothing but another attention-seeking provocateur trying to divide India along linguistic lines for political mileage. His selective outrage about Hindi in UPSC is laughable when India has hundreds of languages. Should we have separate exams for each? The BJP government is simply promoting Hindi as an official language alongside English, not imposing it as these drama queens claim,” posted one X user.
While the UPSC does not officially publish medium-wise final selection data, analyses of annual reports and LBSNAA records suggest that only around 20-50 Hindi-medium candidates have been making it to the final list over the past few years. This marks a sharp decline from the pre-2011 period when Hindi and other Indian-language candidates accounted for roughly 10-15 per cent of successful candidates.
“After the introduction of the Civil Services Aptitude Test (CSAT), Hindi-medium students have been facing a sharp decline in selections as it asks questions on English comprehension, logical reasoning and quantitative aptitude,” said Yash Raj Yadav, a UPSC aspirant studying in Mukherjee Nagar.
The debate over language in the civil services examination is not new. It intensified after changes to the examination pattern in 2011, particularly the introduction of the CSAT, which many Hindi-medium aspirants argued placed them at a disadvantage despite later changes to the paper.
(Edited by Insha Jalil Waziri)