Chennai: The public sector Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) of India came under severe fire from the entire political class of Tamil Nadu, prompting Chief Minister M K Stalin to declare, ‘the LIC website has been reduced to a propaganda tool for Hindi imposition’ and even a BJP leader Tirupathi Narayanan protesting the site turning fully Hindi on Tuesday.
‘Even the option to select English is displayed in Hindi!,’ Stalin said in his X page, soon after the controversy broke out with some news outlets and social media channels pointing out the website turning fully Hindi making it difficult for people with no knowledge of Hindi to navigate it.
Stalin said:‘This is nothing but cultural and language imposition by force, trampling on India's diversity. LIC grew with the patronage of all Indians. How dare it betray the majority of its contributors?'
After several State leaders, including Deputy Chief Minister Udhayanidhi Stalin and Leader of the Opposition Edappadi K Palaniswami, reacted strongly to LIC’s unexpected move, the company clarified: ‘Our Corporate website licindia.in was not shuffling language page due to some technical problem, issue resolved now website available in English/Hindi language.’
But the ‘issue’ remained unresolved even hours after the X page @LICIndiaForever had put out that announcement on Tuesday. Earlier in the day, Stalin demanded a ‘immediate rollback of this linguistic tyranny and Udhayanidhi Stalin said the days of tyranny would not last long.
The Union Government had not learnt the lesson that by imposing anything, including Hindi, it could not be made to grow, Udhayanidhi Stalin said and urged the Union Government to immediately make the website multilingual to enable all the people access the contents.
Palaniswami said it was condemnable that the Union Government was looking for some means or the other to impose Hindi and added that thrusting anything singular on a nation known for its language, cultural, structural and political diversity would not be acceptable.
President of the Dravidar Kazhagam, K Veeramani, said the language-culture imposition move showed the scant respect the BJP-RSS government had for the Constitution and that it was an insult to the majority of the county’s people who did not speak Hindi.
PMK founder S Ramadoss protested against LIC suddenly giving priority to Hindi and wanted the homepage of its website to be made bi-lingual – English and Hindi – and the incorporation of content in all Indian languages in its pages.
He said that even when a consumer product worth Rs 10, coming to the State for sales, had printed instructions in English and Tamil on their cover, an insurance company with such a huge clientele in Tamil Nadu providing information only in Hindi on its homepage was only an insult to LIC’s policy holders.
It is not, however, clear as to when the glitch over the website not shuffling language pages cropped up as a social media user had mentioned in X that the homepage of LIC had turned fully Hindi on October 30 itself.
