LIC website’s language option sparks controversy; TN CM says Hindi imposition

New Delhi: The new website of the Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) has sparked a political controversy due to its default setting of Hindi as the language. Several political leaders, including Tamil Nadu chief minister MK Stalin and the Bhartiya Janata Party(BJP)’s own state unit, have criticized the move, accusing the central government of imposing Hindi on the public.
In a post on X, Stalin said, “The LIC website has been reduced to a propaganda tool for Hindi imposition. Even the option to select English is displayed in Hindi! This is nothing but cultural and language imposition by force, trampling on India’s diversity. LIC grew with the patronage of all Indians. How dare it betray the majority of its contributors? We demand an immediate roll back of this linguistic tyranny.”
To be sure, customised browsers of users who typically access English websites, offer a prompt on translating the website into English (with the prompt itself in English), but the option to choose the language from the main menu is in Hindi.
LIC ‘s new website changed the default language from English to Hindi. The option to change the language to English is under the menu option “bhasha” (language), written in the Devanagiri script. According to the LIC website, there are more than 250 million people who are covered under LIC. The share of individual states isn’t known, but if life insurance trends are similar to general insurance ones –– highly industrialised states such as Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka (Hindi isn’t spoken widely in any) are likely to be the biggest markets.
LIC said the issue was caused by a “technical problem”. “Our corporate website was not shuffling the language page due to some technical problem. The issue is resolved now, and the website is available in English/Hindi language. Inconvenience caused is deeply regretted,” it said in a post on X.
BJP Tamil Nadu vice president Narayanan Thirupathy expressed concern over the issue, urging LIC to reconsider the language settings. He also took to X and said, “I request LIC to change its website from the present form which is in Hindi. Those who can’t read Hindi are unable to convert it to English. Hence the cover may have English and those who want to use Hindi may opt for it.”
AIADMK leader and Leader of Opposition in Tamil Nadu, Edappadi K Palaniswami, also condemned the change, saying, “The public sector company LIC has made Hindi the default language on its website in India. For people who do not know Hindi, it has become nearly impossible to use LIC’s website. The language switch option is also in Hindi, making it difficult to locate. It is highly objectionable for the central government to push for such an imposition under the pretext of promoting Hindi.”
He further added, “In a diverse country like India, which is rich in language, culture, structure, and politics, forcing uniformity in any form disrupts the national balance. This is unacceptable.” He further urged the central government to change the default language to English and “refrain” from any actions that “impose Hindi on the public.”