The Congress on Thursday night sought to claim credit for the Narendra Modi government granting classical language status to Marathi with an eye on the upcoming Maharashtra Assembly elections.

Congress communications in-charge Jairam Ramesh pointed out that the party had been demanding this since 2013 and the Prithviraj Chavan government had written to then Union culture minister Sripad Naik in July 2014. This was acknowledged by the central government on Thursday in its media statement.

The Union cabinet had earlier in the day granted classical language status to Marathi along with Bengali, Assamese, Pali and Prakrit. With this, India now has 11 classical languages. The earlier ones in the list are Tamil, Sanskrit, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam
and Odia.

Ramesh also mapped the “chronology” of efforts made by the Congress over the past decade to draw the attention of the Modi government inside and outside Parliament to this pending demand. During the campaign for the Lok Sabha elections earlier this year, the Congress pledged to accord classical language status to Marathi if the INDIA bloc was voted to power.

The Prime Minister was reminded of the demand again on September 26 during his visit to Pune. Pointing out that Modi had “done nothing on the well-argued case submitted” by Chavan in 2014, the Congress had asked: “What explains the non-biological PM’s special apathy to Marathi culture?”

With the Maharashtra elections round the corner and the Election Commission expected to announce the poll dates any day, the Congress sees Thursday’s announcement as another bid by the Modi government to woo the electorate in the face of “imminent defeat”, pointing out that this is the first time in a decade that any language has been given classical status.