Rajasthan police told to remove Urdu, Persian words from official documents, replace them with Hindi

The Rajasthan government on Saturday directed the state police department to remove Urdu and Persian words in official documents and replace them with Hindi.

In a letter issued to the director general of police, Rajasthan minister Jawahar Singh Bedham told the department to prepare a formal proposal on replacing Urdu and Persian words currently used in documents, letters, reports, notice boards and other communication with Hindi terminology.

The proposal would then be reviewed and implemented at the appropriate administrative level, it added.

The directive by Bedham, the minister of state in the Rajasthan home department, said that in the present times, police personnel and the public at large were not familiar with Urdu and Persian words. It said that due to this, such words should be replaced with terms in Hindi, which it described as the “national language”.

The Constitution does not list any language as the national language. However, Hindi is used as the official language in Rajasthan.

The directive said that Urdu and Persian words were introduced during the Mughal era, and administrators at that time had to learn the languages. However, it said that in the current era, Urdu and Persian words are often misunderstood or interpreted, leading to delays in justice.

The minister claimed that prioritising Hindi in...

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