Ramdev’s Hindi letter exposed Union ministers’ linguistic skills
When a cabinet committee sat to discuss his deal to end fast, it found no minister could read the letter
After a team of Central ministers returned from Claridges Hotel in Delhi after negotiating with Baba Ramdev for five hour on 3 June, they handed over a document signed by Acharya Balkrishna to finance minister Pranab Mukherjee, which was to be discussed at the Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs (CCPA) later that day.
To the horror of Mukherjee, nobody at the CCPA could read the document, which was a handwritten note in Hindi. The CCPA was called to discus the political course on Ramdev’s fast at the Ramlila Maidan.
Except for Textiles Minister Dayanidhi Maran of the DMK, each one of the CCPA members is able to converse in Hindi, be it Mukherjee, Manmohan Singh, P Chidambaram, AK Antony or SM Krishna. But, they were stumped, as they could not read Hindi. Renewable energy minister Farooq Abdullah is also a CCPA member, though invariably he does not attend its meetings. He cannot even read the Devnagri scripttt. (His son Omar Abdullah is, perhaps, the first chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir who can read Hindi.)
The tension in the CCPA meet eased after an officer deputed to take notes read out the hand-written letter, which mentioned Ramdev’s promise to call off the fast. Soon after, Mukherjee turned to Chidambaram and told him to ask the Department of Official Language under the home ministry to organise a crash course in Hindi for him and others in the ministry. He joked that, otherwise, they looked like five blind men describing in own ways an elephant by touching its trunk, tail and legs.
Source : https://tehelka.com/story_main49.asp?filename=Ws110611POLITICS.asp
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