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Australia should send Hindi-speaking diplomats to India: expert
Australia should send Hindi-speaking diplomats to India: expert - Indian Express
Australia should send Hindi speaking diplomats to India, in a bid to take relations with New Delhi to the next level, a renowned international affairs expert has said.
Australian National University's Ian Hall, who is an international affairs expert with an interest in Indian foreign policy, said that even though much of the government business in India was conducted in English, but sending a top diplomat fluent in a local language was a sign of respect, The Australian reported.
We do this with the Chinese and the Indonesians - and we make a bit fuss about the respect stuff - so why not with India?, Hall said.
However, the secretary of Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Dennis Richardson, refuted the idea and said there was no need to speak Hindi.
Richardson, who was questioned during Senate estimates last month about languages in which the department was weaker than it should be, said: It has not been our experience that a head of mission in New Delhi requires (Hindi).
However, he did acknowledge that the diplomats in Indonesia and China were fluent in the respective local languages.
Richardson said that a 2010 review had identified Arabic, Farsi (spoken in Iran), Korean, Thai and Turkish as languages in which there were strategic gaps.
He said that there had been outstanding ambassadors in Jakarta, Beijing and Tokyo who had not spoken the local language.
He added that in deciding postings in general having the language is an important component of it, but it is not the sole component.
You can be a brilliant linguist but you might have appalling judgement. We will go with the judgement, he said.
Australia's Asian languages policy for education embraces four priority languages - Mandarin, Korean, Japanese and Indonesian, but not Hindi.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard, in her speech last year announcing Ken Henry's Asian Century white paper, said India was an English-speaking democracy.
However, the comment led to a rejoinder from Asian studies expert Kent Anderson, that perhaps just four per cent of the population in India was fluent in English.
Hall said that sending a Hindi speaker to New Delhi was not strictly necessary and that, in any case, Australia had made efforts to upgrade the relationship with India.
Peter Varghese (Australia's High Commissioner to India) was symbolic, partly because, as former head of ONA (the Office of National Assessments), he was a 'heavyweight', and partly because he is of Indian origin, albeit Kenyan Indian, Hall said.
His background is Malayalam/Keralan, which might also have been significant, since much of the core national security bureaucracy in Delhi is also from Kerala.
But I also think that Mr Richardson's argument is not strong and it would confirm, to some Indian observers, the prejudice that Australia is not very interested in India, he said.
Like China, India is a civilisation as well as a state, as it were, and rightly proud of its cultural achievements, including languages of real beauty and complexity and a wonderful literary tradition.
So saying that Hindi is not essential is true - much of the business of government is conducted in English, even in parliament - but it misses the point.
It is not just about understanding the culture (or rather, Northern Indian Hindi-language culture - what about Bengali or Gujarati or Marathi or any of the many other languages of India?) but about demonstrating that you respect the country you're dealing with sufficiently to invest in its language, he said.
Australia should send Hindi-speaking diplomats to India: expert - Indian Express
Australia should send Hindi speaking diplomats to India, in a bid to take relations with New Delhi to the next level, a renowned international affairs expert has said.
Australian National University's Ian Hall, who is an international affairs expert with an interest in Indian foreign policy, said that even though much of the government business in India was conducted in English, but sending a top diplomat fluent in a local language was a sign of respect, The Australian reported.
We do this with the Chinese and the Indonesians - and we make a bit fuss about the respect stuff - so why not with India?, Hall said.
However, the secretary of Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Dennis Richardson, refuted the idea and said there was no need to speak Hindi.
Richardson, who was questioned during Senate estimates last month about languages in which the department was weaker than it should be, said: It has not been our experience that a head of mission in New Delhi requires (Hindi).
However, he did acknowledge that the diplomats in Indonesia and China were fluent in the respective local languages.
Richardson said that a 2010 review had identified Arabic, Farsi (spoken in Iran), Korean, Thai and Turkish as languages in which there were strategic gaps.
He said that there had been outstanding ambassadors in Jakarta, Beijing and Tokyo who had not spoken the local language.
He added that in deciding postings in general having the language is an important component of it, but it is not the sole component.
You can be a brilliant linguist but you might have appalling judgement. We will go with the judgement, he said.
Australia's Asian languages policy for education embraces four priority languages - Mandarin, Korean, Japanese and Indonesian, but not Hindi.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard, in her speech last year announcing Ken Henry's Asian Century white paper, said India was an English-speaking democracy.
However, the comment led to a rejoinder from Asian studies expert Kent Anderson, that perhaps just four per cent of the population in India was fluent in English.
Hall said that sending a Hindi speaker to New Delhi was not strictly necessary and that, in any case, Australia had made efforts to upgrade the relationship with India.
Peter Varghese (Australia's High Commissioner to India) was symbolic, partly because, as former head of ONA (the Office of National Assessments), he was a 'heavyweight', and partly because he is of Indian origin, albeit Kenyan Indian, Hall said.
His background is Malayalam/Keralan, which might also have been significant, since much of the core national security bureaucracy in Delhi is also from Kerala.
But I also think that Mr Richardson's argument is not strong and it would confirm, to some Indian observers, the prejudice that Australia is not very interested in India, he said.
Like China, India is a civilisation as well as a state, as it were, and rightly proud of its cultural achievements, including languages of real beauty and complexity and a wonderful literary tradition.
So saying that Hindi is not essential is true - much of the business of government is conducted in English, even in parliament - but it misses the point.
It is not just about understanding the culture (or rather, Northern Indian Hindi-language culture - what about Bengali or Gujarati or Marathi or any of the many other languages of India?) but about demonstrating that you respect the country you're dealing with sufficiently to invest in its language, he said.
. By the way I have a Punjabi background so fluent in that as well 
