Business requirement? Modi’s quiet push for English in Gujarat despite Sangh's swadeshi garb

By Rajiv Shah 

This blog is a continuation of my story "English proficiency for empowerment: Modi’s SCOPE vision contrasts Amit Shah’s remark". I personally found nothing unusual in the Union Home Minister's “feel ashamed” remark directed at those who speak in English, as I have witnessed his dislike for the language on several occasions during my stint as the Times of India representative in Gandhinagar from 1997 to 2012.

In fact, Amit Shah never tried to hide his disdain for English. He would candidly tell me that he didn’t read the Times of India because it was an English daily. Once, ahead of a mass rally during an assembly election campaign in a tribal-dominated region of Gujarat that Modi was about to address, I spotted him. On seeing me, he objected to a particular news item I had written. I asked, “How do you know? You don’t read the Times of India.” He responded, “Yes, but others tell me what appears in your paper.”

On another occasion, as narrated to me later, Shah, accompanied by senior BJP leader Purshottam Rupala, reached my office to lodge a complaint about a report I had written. Bharat Desai, then my editor, heard them out patiently. Suddenly, Shah snapped, “Who reads your English paper?” To this, Desai calmly replied, “If nobody reads our paper, why have you come here? You can have tea and leave.”

Shah’s attitude wasn’t limited to just a contempt for English. Once, while discussing the poor state of education in Gujarat in his home minister’s chamber—an issue many would privately raise—I asked him what he thought should be done to improve the state's educational standards, which I believed were among the poorest in India. His informal reply was startling: “Nothing needs to be done. It’s doing fine. No need to change things.”

Ironically, no one seemed to understand the importance of English for improving educational standards in Gujarat better than his boss, Narendra Modi. Unlike many earlier chief ministers, Modi went out of his way to promote English education in schools. His flagship initiative, SCOPE—Society for Creation of Opportunities through Proficiency in English—was launched with this very objective and continues to this day.

I don’t know the exact reason, but I believe he was convinced that English was a crucial business requirement for attracting investment to Gujarat. One of the major hurdles for those looking to set up enterprises in the state has been the poor educational standards of Gujarati job seekers, which he seemed to associate with their weak English communication skills. I have no reason to believe that he has changed his view after becoming the Prime Minister.

From what I gathered during my days at Sachivalaya, after Modi became chief minister, he consistently urged government officials to draft policies to make English a compulsory subject at the primary and secondary levels. In doing so, he even went against his trusted protégé Anandiben Patel—then education minister and now UP governor—who once told me, “We don’t need English, we need Sanskrit.” Modi’s push for English education became a sore point for many in the RSS.

Once, a pro-RSS group running a school in Gandhinagar, Vidya Bharati, invited journalists for a press-cum-lunch meet. Cloaking a swadeshi garb, their aim was to accuse Modi of “neglecting” Sanskrit in favour of English. They even announced an agitation against this perceived slight to Sanskrit—an agitation that never materialized. I reported the event for the Times of India.

Despite his ideological leanings, credit for reviving English in Gujarat must go to Modi—even though his command of the language was initially weak. During his first business summit, Resurgent Gujarat, held in early February 2002 in the presence of the British ambassador, Modi pronounced “delegates” as “dulgats,” causing amused chuckles in the audience. Yet, he took a surprisingly pragmatic approach to the language that Shah dismissed as “foreign.”

Within three years in office, Modi had improved his English considerably. Around 2003 or 2004, he inaugurated an IT event at InfoCity in Gandhinagar, supported by a global firm. He spoke in English, ex tempore, using short but grammatically correct sentences. During subsequent Vibrant Gujarat summits, Modi continued to speak off-the-cuff in English, without a teleprompter, fully aware that foreign dignitaries and entrepreneurs were key participants.

Even while denouncing “English culture,” Modi, by 2003, had begun instructing officials to draft education policies to overcome English language deficiencies. In fact, his was the first major reversal of a flawed language policy that had persisted since the 1960s. That policy, the result of a debate between two ministers both surnamed Thakore—one dubbed “Thakorebhai Panchava” for wanting English from Class 5, the other “Thakorebhai Athva” for preferring it from Class 8—had led to a compromise: schools could choose. The result? Children began English in Class 8, and dropped it by Class 10, producing a generation with little or no English proficiency.

Modi seemed to recognize this gap as a barrier to Gujarat’s global aspirations. He pushed for English in schools. A key obstacle, then and now, was the chronic shortage of English teachers—but the blame for that lay with his predecessors.

Looking back at my stories for Times of India, I found that in 2006, Modi urged the education department to launch a movement promoting spoken English among Gujarati youth. At the department’s Chintan Shibir, he stressed the importance of this skill: “Poor English among the Gujarati youth is telling adversely on their standing in the world. This stigma should be removed at the earliest. There is a need to develop an atmosphere in which the Gujarati youth, well-equipped with English, are able to show their best skills to the world.”

This was not Modi’s first push for English. A year earlier, in 2005, he proposed starting English education from Class 1. Although the idea gained traction in the bureaucracy, he had to backtrack due to resistance from the Sangh Parivar. The RSS’s education wing, Shiksha Bharati, labeled the move “anti-swadeshi.”

Even in the mid-1990s, when Gujarat decided to introduce English from Class 5, it had declared the subject non-examinable—so most students didn’t study it. Modi changed that in 2004, making English exams mandatory in Class 5 across the state.

“There is indeed a major change now. Even rural areas show a strong interest in English. With free textbooks, rural children are now scoring better in English than in other subjects,” Nalin Pandit, former director of Gujarat Council of Educational Research and Training (GCERT), once told me.

Thanks to Modi’s insistence, the Indian Institute of Teachers’ Education (IITE) was established in 2010 as a university with English as the medium of instruction. I had quoted him in a report saying, “World-class teachers to be produced at IITE must be taught in a language used internationally.” A brainchild of Modi, IITE today offers BA-BEd and BEd-MEd programs in English at its Centre of Education, while affiliated colleges offer B.Ed programs in both English and Gujarati.

IITE emphasizes the development of communication skills in both the mother tongue and English, showing a commitment to multilingualism in teacher training—a vision that stands in direct contrast to the anti-English rhetoric of Amit Shah.