Do India’s 1.3 billion people need English? Not according to Vice President Venkaiah Naidu. At an event last week in New Delhi to mark “Hindi day,” Mr. Naidu called English “a disease left behind by the British.” He praised Hindi as a symbol of India’s “sociopolitical and linguistic unity.”
Indians have debated the place of English since at least 1835, when the British polymath and colonial administrator Thomas Macaulay first opened Western education to natives. To its foes, the persistence of English among Indian elites is...