On May 17, Union home minister Amit Shah boasted at a public gathering in Gandhinagar that while the Congress party had ruled the entire country in the initial years after independence, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) too has nearly achieved that honour after its victory in the West Bengal assembly election. “Now the BJP rules states from Uttarakhand to Uttar Pradesh, from Bihar till West Bengal, covering the area between the origin of river Ganga and the place where it merges with the ocean”. Shah called it an “umbrella rule”.Shah’s statement made me sit up. There was an uncanny similarity between ‘umbrella rule’ and Professor Rajni Kothari’s well-known theorisation about the Congress under the leadership of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru (1947-64). Kothari had characterised the latter as: ‘Umbrella Party’. He talked about the Nehruvian ‘Congress system’, the underlying ethos of which was inclusive. It represented nationalistic, communal, regional, ideological, and caste-centric forces. In contrast, the Narendra Modi-led BJP is not only conspicuously Hindu chauvinistic, it proudly says: ‘We do not need the Muslim votes.’Whatever be the nuanced definition of secularism, and howsoever BJP may ridicule the idea as a Western construct, certain facts stare us in our face. The Modi-led BJP has so far fought three Lok Sabha elections in 2014, 2019 and 2024, as did Nehru’s Congress, in 1952, 1957 and 1962. A comparison, therefore, makes sense. While the BJP did field Muslim candidates in 2019 and 2014, not a single Muslim politician was sent to the parliament by the BJP in either of these elections. In 2024, it fielded just one Muslim candidate in Kerala and he too lost.In contrast, in the 1952 Lok Sabha, Congress government had 21 Muslim members, in 1957 there were 18, and in 1962 it had 20 Muslim MPs. There is, therefore, no competition between Modi and Nehru insofar as their Muslim representation in the parliament is concerned. Since Muslims are about 15% of India’s population even Nehru did not pass the test with flying colours. But compared to Modi his record was splendid.As I have lived both the ‘umbrella party’ and the ‘umbrella rule’ generations in almost equal measure, for me to make a comparison between the two is relatively simpler, personal biases and prejudices notwithstanding. My formative years belonged to the Nehruvian phase, my senior citizen years to the Modi phase. Since this comparison debate is the subject for a book-length study, let me confine my say to just one issue, the medium of instruction at the school level and the language choices available to school students then and now. Medium of instructionLet me draw from one of my childhood experiences. I belonged to a Bengali family of Bhagalpur (Bihar) which had migrated from the Burdwan (now Bardhhaman) district of Bengal in the aftermath of the 1857 revolt. Sometime in the mid-1950s, the then Government of Bihar, led by Shri Krishna Sinha of the Congress party, decided to introduce a system that disallowed students from writing their matriculation examinations in no language other than Hindi. I am not sure whether English too was excluded.This led to a massive students’ agitation launched by those who could not take their exams in Bengali or Urdu medium, essentially meaning the Bengali-Hindus and Muslims. The agitation soon picked up momentum across the state, which ultimately made the government relent. It may be underlined that the agitating students were not harassed by the police, leave alone lathi charged or arrested. I distinctly remember that one of our placards read: ‘matribhasha rashtrabhasha ek saath sikhenge’ (we will learn both our mother tongue and the national language together). In 1961, I took my matriculation examination in Bengali medium.In the process, I ended up learning four languages, Bengali (for Muslims, Urdu), Hindi, English and Sanskrit. While the last two were compulsory, the other two depended on one’s situation. As a result, the Hindi-speaking Bihari students were the ultimate losers for they learnt only Hindi, English and Sanskrit. Their Bengali and Muslim counterparts learnt Bengali or Urdu in addition. Language choicesLet us discuss our language policy today. The Central Board of Secondary Education through its circular dated May 15, 2026 has made it compulsory for secondary students studying with NCERT syllabus to compulsorily opt for three languages Class IX onwards. Of the three languages, at least two must be ‘our native Indian languages’.Without going into the intricate academic and political implications of the circular, which will be far reaching, two quick points may be made. In way of example, let us take the situation of Nagaland with a population of 23 lakh, and contrast it with the massive Hindi-speaking belt comprising eight states – Uttar Pradesh (UP), Madhya Pradesh (MP), Bihar, Rajasthan, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand and the Union Territory of Delhi. Their combined population is about 66 crores.Now, see the contrast between a Naga student and a Hindi-speaking student in a Hindi-majority state. Nagaland’s official language is English which does not figure in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India, hence it is a foreign language. Given the fact the Naga children will opt for English and Hindi, their challenge will be the choice of a third language. In their case it is simple. The most-spoken tongue among the 60 odd Naga tribes is Nagamese which is akin to Assamese. They have little problem because they would opt for English, Hindi and Assamese.But the problem is huge for the Hindi belt, which is accustomed to think that Hindi is the national language of India. Most of the well to do people in the region have, therefore, made their wards learn French, German, Spanish, and so on, to make them attractive to the multinationals at any future date.Ironically, the BJP-led Hindutva-inspired Indian nation today, which gives so much lip service to the promotion of Sanskrit, has created such a system that no elite school students opt for Sanskrit any more. Whatever Sanskrit is taught today it is in the government-run schools where only the poor and deprived students go.The net result of the Modivian education policy is that in today’s India, most Bengalis outside West Bengal do not know Bengali, most Tamils outside Tamil Nadu do not know Tamil, and the same is true for the remaining language groups other than the Hindi speaking people. Their situation, however, is even more pathetic. Most students from the Hindi belt are unlikely to know any language other than Hindi, either in terms of speaking or in writing. Is this the way we are building our nation?Partha Ghosh retired as professor at JNU.