All the barbarian.

— Yasar Kemal, quoted by P.

Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar

Newspaper reports indicate that Tamil would be a language permitted in courts, an obtuse political move that unfortunately does not seem to have paid heed to well-reasoned apprehensions. Somehow, it is difficult to imagine that the condition of the people, even those pursuing literary interests, would improve and that they would experience cultural and political freedom because proceedings in courts would be in regional languages.

The argument in favour of a uniform language structure — English — scores many pragmatic points. With regard to the legal system, the practical difficulties in using regional languages would outweigh the problems of adopting English. Disruption in the unity of the administration of justice, interference with the rights of lawyers and professionals to practice in different courts and also of judges to comprehend proceedings are concerns that do not seem to have been satisfactorily dealt with. The Constitution confers a right on every citizen to pursue a trade or profession anywhere in India. A language barrier would effectively render this constitutional right and the professional regulations quite illusory. This would also affect the officers of the higher judiciary and other professionals, such as chartered accountants and company secretaries, who appear before different fora.

But it isn’t only the rights of those in the legal and accounting professions that will be affected by this obtuse measure. In the Sasikala corruption cases, the defence had a field day with its application for the translation of documents. A whopping Rs 45 lakh is what it cost the Tamil Nadu government in acceding to that request. We can expect to see a lot more of such tactics now, and not just in criminal cases. But the problem of an official language is not one restricted to the courts — it is a policy which has the potential to affect the entire administrative mechanism of the country. The compelling need of the Maharashtra government to “reaffirm” (perhaps a euphemism for “enforcing with a vengeance”) a law that makes the display of name boards in Marathi compulsory is quite strange (IE, April 25). It is surprising that you don’t hear of “reaffirming” social and ameliorative laws. The need to flaunt patriotism or regionalism on such narrow denominations, depending on the flavour of the moment, is quite distasteful and it is painful that we allow ourselves to be misdirected through such machinations.

Surprisingly, this problem afflicts a number of countries. This one perhaps takes the cake: a conservative American Congressman (Paul Broun) introduced the “English as the Official Language Act” of 2008, ironically, on the principle of e pluribus unum (out of many, one). With 18 regional languages and no ethnic group willing to surrender its right of language to another, Uganda’s predicament is close to ours. English thus unified the official part of the country. An interesting study conducted by an American academician sought to develop a mathematical model by imposing costs on the linguistic groups, and comparing these costs with those of an efficient and fair language policy. The Canadian government also achieved its delicate linguistic balance after such a painstaking exercise.

The final word on the language imbroglio must lie with the European Union. With as many as 23 official languages, the EU had an estimated budget of $1.3 billion towards translation costs. The statistics are staggering — 2000 translators, 80 interpreters, and tens of thousands of tonnes of paper. The official language exercise perhaps benefits only statisticians and politicians. Things got quite unmanageable when discussions were stalled when a British member described the EU Constitution as “gobbledygook” and the interpreters were “flummoxed” — words that bewildered those interpreters.

Policymakers have failed to appreciate that superfluous multilingualism can exacerbate problems in India. An exclusive official language policy may cause a sense of disenfranchisement, but today no one is making an objective case for such a problem. As for the courts, one shudders at the perils of translation in the context of court proceedings. Legalese is complicated enough and, with the additional constraints of translation and interpreters, a Pandora’s box is waiting to be opened.

The writer is an advocate based in Delhi

sa_ananth@yahoo.com