Jaaved Jaaferi weighs in on Ajay Devgn’s comments about Hindi: ‘Was under the impression that Hindi is the national language’

The national language debate, which got heated up after recent a Twitter exchange between actors Ajay Devgn and Kiccha Sudeep, had many film personalities chiming in with their opinions. Now, actor Jaaved Jaaferi has said that much like Ajay, he too thought that Hindi was India’s national language.
In a conversation with India Today, Jaaved said that he read up about it and found that “there is no one language.” He said, “Constitutionally, there is no one language. That’s what I looked at. I was looking at the official Indian languages and the constitution gives no language a status of the national language. I came across that. I was even under the impression that Hindi is the national language. But I just looked up that the constitution gives no language the status of a national language.”

Jaaved added that India has 22 official languages and this is “the beauty of this country.” He said, “See, the point is about unity in diversity. That was and is the beauty of this country. There are so many religions but there is no national religion. There is no national language. You have a national bird or a national flower. The future of the country is the simulation of everything and I think no other country has that.”
Singer Sonu Nigam also shared something similar in a recent event moderated journal Sushant Mehta. “Nowhere in the Constitution it is written that Hindi is our national language. It might be the most spoken language, but not the national language. In fact, Tamil is the oldest language. There is a debate between Sanskrit and Tamil. But, people say Tamil is the oldest language in the entire world,” he said.

The debate was fuelled after Ajay tweeted at Sudeep and asked him why he releases Hindi dubbed versions of his films if Hindi ‘is no longer the national language’, as Sudeep had said at an event. Translated in English, his tweet read, “@KicchaSudeep, brother, if Hindi is not our national language according to you, then why do you release films made in your mother tongue dubbed in Hindi? Hindi is our mother tongue, and our national language, and it will always be. Jana Gana Mana.”