That it has done so under the rule of a regional party (whose platform includes special promotion of Punjabi), in alliance with a junior partner of particularly pro-Hindi proclivities, is significant. It is a step taken in recognition and protection of a regional interest that had been ignored hitherto by the powers that be.

Punjab had recently been preceded in this respect by West Bengal. The Left Front government of the latter had held out for long against letting the colonial and neo-imperialist language enter the portals of a primary school.

Ideological rigidity had to be abandoned, however, under increasing public pressure (with the support of a section of the Left) for dropping a policy that had damaged the prospects of the state's youth. The same reasonhas persuaded a revision of similar policies elsewhere.

The fodder scam, for example, did not detract from the force of Laloo Prasad Yadav's logic that the Biharis stood to benefit, especially on the employment front, from a better grasp over English and a review of the language policy introduced by his predecessor, the late Karpoori Thakur.

It is not the employment-related argument alone that supports the case for English. If the Angrezi hatao campaigns have become a dim and distant memory (Mulayam Singh Yadav in his first term as Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister was the last of such crusaders), it is also because of the increasingly evident hollowness and hypocrisy of the slogan.

The people did not take unduly long to see through the pretentiously radical rhetoric of the political class that took care to ensure an English-medium, `public-school' education, preferably phoren, for its own children. The relatively affluent sections of society have helped to reinforce the hypocritical assumptionof a mismatch between education with or in English and the masses. The premise that English can only be an imposition on students of schools for the poor has been accepted and acted upon without even any pretense of a consultation with them.

The height of the off-with-English hypocrisy, of course, consists in the `cultural' tirade against the colonial tongue. Those who see nothing unacceptably Western in their many gadgets of comfort wax unconvincingly eloquent about the virtues of strictly `swadeshi' speech, specially in schools where their social inferiors should not be taught the secret language of success.

It is bad enough that the pseudo-nationalist slogan disregards the statutory status enjoyed by English as an official as well as a national language along with others which the sloganeers have done precious little to equip and promote as a medium of modern education and communication. Worse, however, have been the attempts to close a window on the world for a country that has never opted for acourse of self-isolation. Punjab's decision is additional evidence that such attempts are doomed.