Sanskrit or German?

Sanskrit has not lost its political significance despite being called a dead language by its detractors. Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani made a controversial decision last week of replacing German with Sanskrit as the third language in some 500 central government-run Kendriya Vidyalayas. However, she later dismissed charges that the decision was an attempt to "saffronise" education. She even turned down demands that Sanskrit be made a compulsory subject. The debate has once again pushed us back to 1954 when the Centre had to set up a Sanskrit Commission to study the viability of including Sanskrit in the school curriculum. Many years later the Supreme Court rejected a petition that the teaching of Sanskrit was "against secularism" and allowed the educational institutions to promote the language.
Recently, a Reddit India user translated dialogues of a popular Bollywood film "Sholay" into Sanskrit, shared by hundreds of bloggers. The new-age response to the weary and repetitive language controversy certainly offered a hilarious shift. By putting Gabbar Singh's popular expletives into a classical language, the translator made even Gabbar sound polite and cultured! Unfortunately, the entire issue about Sanskrit is not to focus on its inherent linguistic perfection or cultural richness. Languages have been used to stress secular credentials, or the absence of it, of certain political parties and to promote national integration in a vague manner. In all these attempts the core issue of learning and teaching of modern and classical languages has been ignored.
Responding to high aspirations of the young, several private schools have started the teaching of foreign languages like French, Korean, Chinese etc by diluting the guidelines for the three-language formula. The Central Board of Secondary Education is set to issue a warning to all its affiliated institutions about teaching a foreign language as one of the three compulsory languages. The CBSE, and for that matter the HRD Ministry, should understand the need to include languages that meet aspirations of students, and not make a political statement.