Languages of India
Until the Twenty-first Amendment of the Constitution of India in 1967, the country recognised 14 official regional languages. The Eighth Schedule and the Seventy-First Amendment provided for the inclusion of Sindhi, Konkani, Meitei and Nepali, thereby increasing the number of official regional languages of India to 18. The Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India, as of 1 December 2007, lists 22 languages, which are given in the table below together with the speaking population and the regions where they are used. 
The individual states, the borders of most of which are or were drawn on socio-linguistic lines, can legislate their own official languages, depending on their linguistic demographics. The official languages chosen reflect the predominant as well as politically significant languages spoken in that state. Certain states having a linguistically defined territory may have only the predominant language in that state as its official language, examples being Karnataka and Gujarat, which have Kannada and Gujarati as their sole official language respectively. Telangana, with a sizeable Urdu-speaking Muslim population, has two languages, Telugu and Urdu, as its official languages.
Rise of Dravidian parties to power in Tamil Nadu
The major driving force of the anti-Hindi agitation was not the questioning of protecting Tamil, but questions of the future of Tamils. Hindi as a suitable candidate for the official language of India after independence was first proposed by the Motilal Nehru Report of 1928. An Official Language Commission appointed under the terms of the Constitution in 1955 to review the situation supported Hindi as the sole official language, although members from Bengal and Madras dissented in favour of English. As of the 1961 census, there were 1652 languages. Hindi as an official language was opposed for two reasons: the first because the numbers of people with knowledge of English were fairly evenly spread, and also that imposition of Hindi would give a major advantage in terms of job and educational possibilities to those who had Hindi as their mother tongue. In effect a Tamil who would desire to pursue union civil service would have to learn three languages, Tamil, Hindi and English, which are members of three different language families and each is written in a different script. Therefore, a three-language formula proposed was seen as a great educational burden imposed on non-Hindi-speaking states. Nehru promised in 1959 that the interests of the non-Hindi speakers would be safeguarded, and so did Lal Bahadur Shastri later, but those promises didn't put the fears of non-Hindi speakers to rest.