Bengali language left out from verdict list of Supreme Court!
The letter written by the lawyers of Calcutta High Court to the Chief Justice of India is as follows:
To
Sri Ranjan Gogoi,
The Hon’ble Chief Justice of India,
New Delhi,
Sir,
We are extremely delighted at the decision that the verdicts of the Supreme Court of India will be available in Indian vernaculars. This decision will certainly be beneficial to commoners having no or a very little knowledge of English. But at the same time we are astonished to see that the list of seven (7) languages chosen so far by your good office does not have any place for Bengali.
It is a fact beyond any statistical manipulation that Bengali is that vernacular, which, on the strength of population using it, stands second in India. It is surpassed by only one language, i.e. Hindi. According to the Census Report of 2011, 9.61 crores of Indian citizens declared Bengali as their mother tongue while that for Hindi was 32.22 crores. By percentage in respect of Indian population, Bengali scored 7.94%. Excepting Hindi, all other vernaculars mentioned by your good office are far below that benchmark.
Most surprisingly the list includes Oriya and Assamese with mere percentage status of 2.81% and 1.22% respectively. If the Apex Court truly holds a desire to reach the commoners, then the decision keeps almost one-tenth of the population out of the arena. No justifiable reason can be placed in favour this.
Apart from the statistical data of population, Bengali is the First Official Language of two states, viz West Bengal and Tripura. And it is certainly known to you that in spite of a sufficient speaker-base, it is denied the status of second state language in Assam. Globally Bengali is the 6th most spoken language by number of native speakers and 7th most spoken language by total number of speakers in the world. Excepting Hindi, no other native language of India even dreams of that status.
On the stand point of these, we are of the strong opinion that the list declared by the Supreme Court has not considered the ground reality.
Hence, we request you to rectify the mistake and include Bengali in the list declared so far.
