Sudip Bandopadhyay of the TMC brought up in the Parliament on Monday the need of including the Garo and Khasi languages in the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution.
“I want to discuss about the eighth schedule’s inclusion of the Garo and Khasi languages. A part of the population with a unique language, script, or culture has the right to preserve it, according to Article 29 of the constitution. Garo and Khasi have been designated associate official languages under the Meghalaya State Legislature Act 2005,” he stated.
According to him, Meghalaya and the mountainous regions of Assam are home to the Khasi tribe and their native Astro-Asiatic language.
Speaking in Meghalaya, Assam, Tripura, and Nagaland, Garo is a Tibeto-Burmese language belonging to the Boro-Jingpko group. Over 13 lakh (46.5%) Khasi speakers and 9 lakh (31.5%) Garo speakers are recorded in the Census of 2011. The lack of their own unique scripts has been the challenge with including the two languages, he noted.
The Meghalaya Legislative Assembly approved a resolution on September 27, 2018, requesting that the Khasi and Garo languages be added to the eighth schedule of the Constitution.
Sudip Bandopadhyay urged the union government to take the state’s request into consideration and add the Garo and Khasi to the eighth schedule.
Derek O’Brien, a TMC Rajya Sabha member, had written to the Rajya Sabha’s Secretary General on July 25 to bring up the subject of Meghalaya’s languages.
The repeated rejection of Garo and Khasi as official languages of this country, he wrote in his letter, “displays the second-class treatment that the Central Government presents towards the North-East in general and Meghalaya in particular. I denounce the current Meghalayan government and the Union government for their ongoing indifference to and disregard for the opinions of the state’s residents.
