New Delhi: English should be made optional and Sanskrit taught in schools as part of the three-language formula, Samskrita Bharati, an organisation associated with the RSS, has said in a request to the Modi government.
The Samskrita Bharati, founded by RSS members in the 1980s for promotion of the ancient language, wants this change included in the New Education Policy, whose draft version is currently being vetted by the government.
The appeal came at an event Monday where Samskrita Bharati felicitated MPs of the 17th Lok Sabha who took their oath of office in Sanskrit. Altogether, 47 MPs including Union ministers Pratap Sarangi, a debutant, Harsh Vardhan, and Meenakshi Lekhi took the oath in Sanskrit.
“Sanskrit should be made a part of the three-language formula along with Hindi and any other language, which could be a mother tongue or regional language,” said Dinesh Kamat, the all-India head of Samskrita Bharati, at the event.
“This is an appeal I want to make to the government as a suggestion for the New Education Policy. English should be made optional but it should be available to everyone who wants to study the language,” Kamat added.
Speaking Sanskrit, he said, will help people connect with their roots.
Vardhan, Sarangi and Lekhi were among the MPs in attendance at the event, where most speakers made addresses in Sanskrit and stressed the importance of promoting it as a language of the masses.
While Sarangi offered a fluent discourse on the various qualities of the language, Vardhan had to refer to a written speech, but spoke with some difficulty all the same.
“Sanskrit is the language for science, mathematics, and environment,” he said, “If it is used more often by India, we will become a world leader.”
Sarangi called Sanskrit the “most scientific language”, from which several foreign languages derived words, also offering up a few examples.
A plan for all MPs
Members of Samskrita Bharati said at the event that the idea behind felicitating the MPs was to send a message to the public about the mass appeal of Sanskrit.
The organisation now wants other MPs to learn the language, and says it has approached Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla with an offer to organise a 10-day Sanskrit workshop, for two hours each day, at Parliament House.
“We ran a workshop inside Parliament in 1981, which was attended by leaders like Murli Manohar Joshi and Lal Krishna Advani,” Kamat said, “We want to run a similar workshop again to teach Sanskrit to all the MPs.”
The language, whose appeal has dwindled among the masses, has received a push under the Modi government. Just a few days after Ramesh Pokhriyal ‘Nishank’ took office, the Union Human Resource Development Ministry began work on a plan to develop Sanskrit-speaking villages in India, two of them near Delhi.
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