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Tamilnadu News
DMK, PMK blast centre for ignoring Tamil in President’s awards for scholars
April 30, 2018
Chennai : Tamil Nadu opposition parties on Monday condemned the BJP and the central government for insulting Tamil language by ignoring scholars for the Presidential Award of Certificate of Honour and Maharishi Badryan Vyas Samman.
DMK working president MK Stalin charged the BJP leaders with playing drama as if they love Tamil language and alleged that they were instead only cheating the people of the state. Even Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s lament that he could only say vanakkam in Tamil and nothing else was nothing more than a mere drama, Stalin said.
“All these are just to cheat the people of Tamil Nadu can be seen by the BJP led Central government,” Stalin said in a statement issued here on Monday.
Tamil was the first Indian language to be accorded the classical language status by the Central government in 2004 and it was followed by Sanskrit (2005). Only after these two languages the Indian government conferred the classical status to other languages.
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There are two kinds of awards given by Indian President to language scholars – (a) Certificate of Honour for scholars aged 60 and above and (b) Maharishi Badrayan Vyas Samman for scholars between 30-45 years of age.
Scholars in the following languages – Sanskrit, Pali, Prakrit, Arabic, Persian, Classical Oriya, Classical Malayalam, Classical Kannada and Classical Telugu- are eligible to apply.
But Tamil, he said, was glaringly omitted.
Similar was the shock expressed by former union health minister Anbumani Ramadoss. He said the other languages got classical status and hence the scholars are awarded. But the omission of Tamil from the honours list was glaring, Ramadoss said adding that of all the South Indian languages, Tamil was the oldest among Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada.
If you take the number of people speaking a language, Tamil was by far more popular that Sanskrit, which very few people, in just few thousands, speak it. When compared to this, Tamil was spoken by nearly 10 crore people in India, whose mother tongue it is, Ramadoss said.
Sadly, the Tamil Nadu government had also failed abjectly in bringing this glaring mistake to the notice of the central government and rectify the mistake.
