A workshop meant to strengthen women legislators' participation in lawmaking has produced a very different debate: who gets to participate fully when a national event is conducted predominantly in a language they do not understand well?
Women legislators from Kerala left a National Commission for Women programme in Faridabad after saying repeated requests for greater use of English were not accommodated.
Their complaint was not that Hindi speakers should be prevented from using their language. The delegation said the problem was the absence of adequate arrangements for representatives who could not follow Hindi comfortably.
What began as a disagreement over the conduct of a workshop soon acquired a political dimension in Kerala, where senior leaders accused the organisers of linguistic imposition and questioned whether national institutions were adequately respecting India's multilingual character.
Kerala Delegation Objects to Language Arrangements
The NCW held the two-day programme on September 7 and 8 at Surajkund in Faridabad under its “She is a Changemaker” initiative.
More than 100 women legislators from across India attended, with Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla inaugurating the workshop. The programme focused on gender-responsive governance and was intended to build legislators' understanding of parliamentary and legislative processes.
Members of the Kerala delegation said they arrived expecting practical discussions on lawmaking, governance and their responsibilities as elected representatives.
Their experience, they said, was different.
According to the legislators, much of the spoken programme was conducted in Hindi. English appeared in some printed material and posters, but they said that did little to help delegates follow presentations delivered in a language they did not understand sufficiently.
The Kerala representatives asked for greater use of English or translation support. They said those requests were not adequately addressed.
They eventually left before the final session and closing ceremony.
‘Mix It With English So We Could Understand’
Kerala Minister Bindhu Krishna described the delegation's position in practical rather than ideological terms.
“We are from South India. We don't understand Hindi to that extent, so we requested that they mix it with English so we could understand. But nobody heard,” she said.
That comment captures the central complaint more accurately than the broader political language that followed.
The legislators were not demanding an English-only event, nor were they objecting to participants speaking Hindi. They wanted a national programme to function in a way that allowed representatives from different linguistic regions to follow the discussion.
Deputy Speaker Shanimol Osman argued that organisers of national conferences should anticipate the needs of participants arriving from South India, the Northeast and other regions where Hindi is not necessarily widely spoken.
For the delegation, the issue was therefore one of access. Being invited to a national forum had limited value, they argued, if participants could not understand substantial portions of the programme.
Complaints Extended Beyond Language
The Kerala legislators also expressed disappointment with the format of the workshop.
They said they had expected greater interaction among elected representatives, including opportunities to exchange experiences and discuss practical problems encountered in legislative work.
Instead, according to their account, much of the event consisted of lectures.
Fathima Thahliya said an open-house discussion that participants had expected did not take place.
Those complaints are separate from the language dispute but help explain why the delegation's frustration escalated. Their objection was not simply that speakers chose Hindi; they believed the overall programme gave them too little opportunity to participate meaningfully.
Competing Claims Inside the Workshop
The disagreement reportedly became sharper after the Kerala representatives raised the language issue.
Members of the delegation alleged that a legislator from a Hindi-speaking state told them she could teach them Hindi if they could not understand it.
They also claimed some participants referred to Hindi as India's national language and insisted that proceedings would continue in Hindi.
The Kerala legislators further alleged that slogans including “Jai Shri Ram” and “Bharat Mata Ki Jai” were raised as the disagreement intensified.
These accounts require careful attribution. They come from members of the Kerala delegation, and the NCW had not provided an immediate detailed response to those specific allegations in the reports available after the controversy emerged.
The walkout and the delegation's objection to the language arrangements are established. Claims about individual remarks and exchanges inside the venue remain their account of what happened.
Political Argument Moves Back to Kerala
The dispute did not end when the legislators left Faridabad.
Senior Kerala political figures framed their treatment as part of a larger argument over language and the relationship between the Union and the states.
V D Satheesan described the episode as “deeply condemnable” and argued that national institutions had a responsibility to accommodate India's linguistic diversity.
“Forcing Hindi at a national conclave and intimidating delegates from non-Hindi-speaking states strikes at the core of our constitutional compact,” he said.
He added: “India is a Union of diverse linguistic traditions, not a monolithic entity.”
Satheesan said national forums should operate through “mutual respect, accommodation and constitutional equality, not linguistic imposition.”
Those remarks broadened the dispute considerably. The question was no longer simply whether an NCW workshop had been organised effectively, but whether the experience reflected a wider tendency to treat Hindi as the default language at national institutions.
Tharoor Links Row to Cooperative Federalism
Congress MP Shashi Tharoor also criticised the episode.
He called it “an object lesson in how New Delhi mis-defines ‘cooperative Federalism’” and asked: “When will they ever learn?”
Tharoor has long been involved in public debates about India's linguistic diversity, and his intervention placed the NCW episode within an established political disagreement over the role of Hindi in national life.
One factual point is particularly relevant to that debate: India does not have a constitutionally designated national language.
Hindi in Devanagari script is the official language of the Union, while English continues to be used for Union official purposes under the applicable legal framework. The Constitution's Eighth Schedule recognises 22 languages.
That makes any claim that Hindi is India's “national language” legally and constitutionally distinct from its status as an official language of the Union.
The More Practical Question Is Participation
The politics surrounding Hindi can easily overwhelm the narrower problem raised by the Kerala delegation.
A national conference involving legislators from across India has to decide how people speaking different languages will communicate. There are several practical ways to manage that problem: interpretation, bilingual presentations, translated material or greater use of a mutually accessible working language.
The Kerala legislators' case is that the NCW programme did not provide enough of those accommodations.
That question can be considered separately from whether Hindi should have been used. A speaker addressing Hindi-speaking delegates can reasonably choose Hindi; the institutional challenge is ensuring that representatives who do not understand it are not excluded from the substance of the discussion.
The same principle applies in the other direction when national events are held in regions where another language predominates.
For a workshop designed specifically to strengthen legislators' capacity, comprehension is not a secondary logistical detail. It determines whether the programme can achieve its stated purpose.
An Organisational Dispute With a Larger Political Meaning
The controversy now operates on two levels.
The first concerns the NCW workshop itself: what language arrangements were made, how organisers responded to the Kerala delegation's requests and what exactly was said when the disagreement escalated.
Some of those details remain contested or are supported only by the delegation's account.
The second issue is harder to contain within a single event. National institutions routinely bring together representatives from states with very different linguistic traditions. Decisions about interpretation and working languages inevitably shape who can participate on equal terms.
Kerala's legislators have used their experience in Faridabad to argue that this basic accommodation was missing.
Their walkout has consequently turned a two-day training programme into another test of a question India has negotiated throughout its modern political history: how a national institution creates common ground without treating linguistic uniformity as the price of participation.
