Languages with official status in India
The Constitution of India designates the official language of the Government of India as Hindi written in the Devanagari script, as well as English. There is no national language as declared by the Constitution of India. Hindi is used for official purposes such as parliamentary proceedings, judiciary, communications between the Central Government and a State Government. States within India have the liberty and powers to specify their own official language(s) through legislation and therefore there are 22 officially recognized languages in India of which Hindi is the most used. The number of native Hindi speakers is about 25% of the total Indian population; however, including dialects of Hindi termed as Hindi languages, the total is around 44% of Indians, mostly accounted from the states falling under the Hindi belt. Other Indian languages are each spoken by around 10% or less of the population.
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.