Incredible India: Four lessons from the recently launched tourist helpline

It is important to understand the anti-people ideology that lies beneath some apparently people-friendly initiatives. The 12-language 24x7 tourist helpline launched last month by Union Minister of State for Tourism and Culture Mahesh Sharma is one such initiative.

By adopting multi-lingual “global standards”, it projects an outward image of inclusiveness – at least in its form. A close scrutiny of reality and policy signals, however, reveals the deep ideology of exclusion that lies beneath – in its content.

Privileged languages

Consider this: Minister Mahesh Sharma’s tourist helpline has Arabic, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Portuguese and Russian languages, none of which are among the top 10 tourist languages in India. The other two helpline languages are Hindi and English, in which huge amount of information is already present in nearly all major tourist sites in India.

Now consider this: In 2013, domestic tourists in India outnumbered foreign tourists by about 163 to 1. If such helplines are to help tourists travel hassle-free, isn’t it time to spare a thought for languages whose speakers exist in the largest numbers among tourists, particularly those whose languages have minimal to non-existent tourism-help infrastructure?

If the helpline had anything to do with what kind of language assistance tourists in India mostly need but don’t get, we would have helplines in Indian – indeed, South Asian – languages other than Hindi and English as well. For looking beyond domestic tourists, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are among the top five source countries for tourists in India.

While major languages of all white-majority countries among the top 15 source countries for foreign tourist arrival are covered in the new helpline, for the many brown-skinned Bangla or Tamil or Sinhala speaking foreign tourists, however, there’s no such help.

Parsing the helpline

What clues do we gain into the government’s ideology and resultant policy from something as mundane as a tourist helpline?

Firstly, all tourists are not equal – to external-image-conscious government, concerns of foreign tourists are far more important, even if they are relatively fewer in number.

Secondly, a Hindi tourist must not be inconvenienced anywhere in the India, even if that means adding more tourism infrastructure for Hindi in addition to what already exists that already far, far surpasses that of any other language – except English.

Thirdly, if you happen to be a non-Hindi Indian citizen who doesn’t know English (that is, a majority of non-Hindi Indian citizens) but still would need information, the government couldn’t care less.

Fourthly, if you happen to be a foreign tourist from a brown-skinned country, you don’t matter.

Incredible India

The government of India creates better equipped hostels for foreign students, erects visual barriers beside poor people’s housing agglomerations during “international” events and does not, for example, allow auto-rickshaws in Delhi’s international airport. It’s a disease of race and class.

When Air India has a Chennai to Kolkata flight where a majority of passengers naturally understand Tamil or Bangla, not a single Air India announcement is made at Chennai or Kolkata airports – or, most crucially, on board while giving safety instructions, in either Tamil or Bangla.

This is where class-discrimination and discrimination against non-Hindi peoples come together in a naked form. The “acceptable” Tamil or Bengali on board a Chennai to Kolkata flight is one who understands English, if not Hindi.

A Tamil lady who doesn’t know English or Hindi does not deserve to be fully serviced at the airport or on-board. She is made to feel inadequate and out of place. It’s a sad commentary on the diversity showcasing public relations blitz called “Incredible India”. Incredible, indeed.

Wrong priorities

It is similarly incredible that no local train ticket within West Bengal or Tamil Nadu, for instance, has the station names printed in Bangla or Tamil. With its warped vision of what is tourism and who is a tourist, the government has got its priorities all wrong.

Nothing in the Constitution of India bans safety announcements in Tamil and Kannada for flights between Chennai and Bengaluru. It’s the deep ideology of the Indian Union that does – an ideology that conceives the non-Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan people as ill-formed citizens, whose mother-tongues and concerns need to be suppressed, who need to be beaten into a new shape for cohesion and assimilation as equal citizens of the Indian Union.

Official language rules don’t become a hindrance when non-brown foreign languages need to be enabled. For excluding non-Hindi subcontinental languages, smokescreens of laws and logistical limitations are constructed. Servility to outsiders and dominating less powerful insiders is the game.

A large survey from 2002 by the union ministry of tourism shows that about half of all domestic tourists (excluding social travel), numbering more than 100 million, travelled for “religious purposes and pilgrimages”. Eight of the top 10 tourist destinations in India are religious/pilgrimage sites.

Of the total number of trips made by all domestic tourists, those by cultivators or agricultural wage-labourers contribute the largest proportion. Consider this: 80% of all domestic tourists are not college-graduates, 70% of all tourist trips are made in buses. These numbers reveal how deliberately removed from reality the government’s high-profile tourism initiatives are.

In the post-1990 scenario, when public utilities are shrinking and the public space is becoming increasingly exclusionary, the Anglo-Hindi reshaping of the public space has the stamp of approval from big money and powerful urban cosmopolitan elites.

While Ahomiyas, Meiteis, Bengalis, Marathis and others have no place in this helpline or the new Indian ideology, we must remember that it has no place for the poor Awadhi or Bhojpuri tourist – deliberately mis-categorised as “officially Hindi” – or the brown foreigner either.